What I look forward to at PGConf.EU in Athens

As PGConf.EU kicks off this week in Athens, I wanted to share why this event is special to me.

You can find me talking at the Extension Ecosystem Summit, involved in the Postgres Europe Diversity Committee, or hosting a Xata dinner (grab your RSVP below).

But first, a little bit of history...

PGConf.EU holds a special place in my heart. I gave my first English talk at the event in Vienna back in 2015, which was only my second time abroad for a conference after FOSDEM that same year. From that moment, I felt a strong sense of belonging and made a personal commitment to attend as many Postgres conferences as possible. Thankfully, I’ve been supported in this mission by the companies I’ve worked for over the years.

Since then, I’ve made lifelong friends, some of whom feel like family, and I’ve had the opportunity to give many talks and organize more conferences along the way.

I've also had the privilege of organizing, speaking at, or attending two conferences in the cities I’ve lived in. PGConf.EU came to Tallinn in 2016 while I was pursuing my Master's there and working remotely for 2ndQuadrant. That remains one of my favorite conferences to date, and in my opinion, we had the best conference party ever! But as we all know, party photos are best kept private so here’s the official speakers photo instead! 😄

Fast-forward to 2023, and PGConf.EU came to Prague, the city I now call home! In 2022, I had planned to attend the Berlin conference, but I broke my toe right before it, and that little mishap kept me from going. Thankfully, last year’s event was local, and all my toes were intact! 😄

Last year in Prague, over 700 Postgres enthusiasts gathered just before Christmas. It was amazing to reconnect in person, share our passion for Postgres, and catch up on life in general!

This year, for Athens, we’ve already surpassed 700 attendees and the numbers are still climbing! Huge thanks to the organizers and staff who have worked tirelessly to make this event possible.

Last year’s PGConf.EU was special for me because it was the first time my daughter attended the conference with me. She had an absolute blast! At one point, she told me, "Mommy, I keep meeting new people!" which perfectly captured the exciting and sometimes overwhelming energy of a conference full of conversations and connections. Many of my friends met her for the first time, and they showered her with gifts, making her feel truly special ❤.

A big thank you to all the booth staff as well! She visited every booth and collected all kinds of treasures—wooden puzzles, activity books, squeezy hippos, rubber ducks, Christmas tree ornaments, bouncy balls, stickers, and sweets. She was running around, chatting with everyone, and enjoying the tasty food. Speaking of which, the food last year was really delicious—a big thumbs up for that too!

I’m incredibly grateful to the organizers for providing daycare at the venue last year. It was a game-changer, allowing me to bring her along. It's a fantastic step towards making the Postgres community more inclusive for parents. However, due to low demand, there won’t be daycare at the venue this year. But I’m proud of the community for striving toward better standards of inclusivity, and I hope this option returns in the future.

In Prague, I knew if I ever mention a talk from the event, that would be "Trying to be Barbie in Ken's Mojo Dojo Casa House" presented by two wonderful women Karen Jex and Lætitia AVROT.

In my view, this was a pivotal moment in the history of the Postgres community. As the photos earlier in the post show, our community, like much of the tech industry, is predominantly male. Delivering a talk that highlights the biases faced by underrepresented groups in tech, and discussing how we can improve as a community and as individuals, was a major step forward. Having this conversation openly, in a room full of people, is a powerful move toward a more inclusive future.

PGConf.EU is the event I am the most excited about among all the Postgres conferences I attend the whole year! Thanks for all the organizers and staff for making this happen!

We are also one of sponsors and I am glad we get to support the event again this year to contribute to Postgres community.

This year, I will put on many hats, as I have done in previous years. One of them is being a member of Program Committee. Creating an event schedule is a challenging task, not only due to the sheer number of talks and speakers but to find a balance between different topics and experience levels. That's why there were 6 of us this year to review the talks and create the schedule and hopefully we did a good job, see the full schedule here.

Another exciting thing I am part of is the Postgres Europe Diversity Committee.

As you can see from the conference photos I shared from 2015 and 2016, there were only a few women who gave talks, 4 or 5 at most, confirmed with event schedule. And probably fewer Postgres contributors. It is clear that the Barbie photo from the last year showed there is indeed an improvement, but we still have a long way to go.

I am a firm believer of investing in diversity and inclusion initiatives. And it is usually a long-term investment. First, you need to bring people in, invite them to conferences, support them with travel funds, donate conference tickets, make sure they will feel safe and welcome when they join the conferences and eventually feel confident to give talks. After that, some of them will become active contributors to the community, some will be interested in helping with those conferences, some will become Postgres committers.

Having a community that is inclusive makes things better for everyone, not only for the underrepresented groups. For this reason, I've recently joined newly forming Postgres Europe Diversity Committee and we will have our first meeting in Athens on 22nd October. We have a lot of plans and initiatives to make the Postgres community more inclusive and diverse and I am happy to be part of it.

Day 0 of the PGConf.EU is the busiest for me. Right after the Diversity Committee meeting, I will be joining the Extension Ecosystem Summit. It is a truly collaborative event organized by Tembo (thanks Floor!) and Xata is one of the sponsors.

The summit will be a great opportunity to meet other extension developers, share ideas, and collaborate on shared goals. I will be presenting pgzx, an open-source library for developing PostgreSQL extensions written in Zig, developed at Xata.

Here is the agenda for the summit:

There are still a few slots left, so if you are interested in extension development, you should join us.

As with every conference, the people make the event and I feel extremely happy that Xata hosts a dinner to make it easier for attendees to meet each other. So, if you are attending the conference and will be in Athens on 22nd October before 18:00, please join us for dinner!

We have only a few slots left, so hurry up and RSVP!

The conference will start with a keynote by the amazing Stacey Haysler.

By day, I'm the CFO and COO of PGX, Inc., a Postgres-only consultancy in San Francisco, California. I'm also the President of the U.S. PostgreSQL Association (PgUS), a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of PostgreSQL through education and advocacy. I'm an organizer of the San Francisco Bay Area PostgreSQL Users Group. At conferences in the US and Europe, you'll often find me at the registration desk. I'm also the creator of the original PostgreSQL Community Code of Conduct, and was the first Chair of the Community CoC Committee for three years. By night, I sleep, since that's a lot to do every day!

Stacey is one of the people I really look up to in the Postgres community. She is a great leader and a great person, her energy and passion for the community is unmatched. She is also one of the major contributors to the Postgres project, and knows the project and community very well. Her keynote will reflect her deep understanding of the project, the community, and the contributors.

PostgreSQL is free and open-source, so there is no license fee to pay. However, keeping the project successful requires the work of many people—engineers, website managers, event organizers, project administrators, and on and on. It takes a global community to support the project, and community participation is the license fee we pay to ensure the project's continuity. I'll give an overview of how the project is organized, which will also provide a myriad of ideas for becoming involved in ways that meet your interests and skills, and keep the project robust and resilient.

I am looking forward to her talk and I am sure it will be a great start to the conference!

On Thursday, October 24 at 10:30 - 11:20 my colleague Andrew Farries will be giving a talk about how to do Postgres schema migrations without breaking dependent applications by leveraging the expand/contract pattern. See the abstract below:

pgroll is a new open-source migration tool for Postgres that keeps multiple versions of a schema live during a migration, helping you roll out database schema changes without downtime. Database schema migrations often pose significant challenges to developers, particularly when striving for zero downtime migrations. There are many things that can go wrong:

• Schema changes breaking client applications
• Unexpected table locking causing downtime
• Human mistakes causing data loss

This talk presents a new approach to schema migrations using an 'expand/contract' pattern where multiple versions of a database schema are maintained during the migration, allowing old and new versions of client applications to run side-by-side during an application rollout. Each version of the application sees the version of the database schema with which it is designed to work.

The talks covers the ideas behind this approach, and the challenges to be overcome such as:

• Limitations of existing tools and techniques for Postgres schema migrations.
• The use of Postgres views to present multiple versions of an underlying table.
• Backfilling data between old and new schema versions.
• Techniques to avoid unexpected table locking during migrations.

Finally we introduce pgroll, an open-source tool that puts these ideas into practice and we show how it can be used to facilitate safe application rollouts across database schema changes.

Schema migrations can be tricky. When done manually, it requires serious planning, managing locks, and having a rollback plan in case something goes wrong. pgroll is the tool designed exactly for easing the pain of schema migrations and Andrew is leading the development of this tool at Xata.

If you attend the talk, please let us know what you think about pgroll after the talk!

This year, in June, I had the pleasure of visiting beautiful Rapperswil to give a talk at Swiss PGDay. It was a great event and probably one of the best venues to give a talk at. Hope to make it to next year's event as well!

And thanks to probably being a part of the conference, I got an invite to the Swiss Networking Dinner on Thursday evening. Thanks Tobias for the invite and dbi services for sponsoring the dinner! I am looking forward to it!

Last time I saw Simon was in Prague at PGConf.EU last year. He stopped by to visit my daughter in daycare, and we had a maybe 15 minute chat. Then we agreed to see each other soon, but sadly it was not to be. And I don’t think I’ve fully come to terms with losing him so soon.

PGConf.EU was always the event that brought us together, as Simon made it a point for the team to reunite. This year will be the first PGConf.EU without him, and it's hard to imagine being there without him. It still feels unreal.

If you knew Simon, you know how deeply he loved Postgres and the community. He was instrumental in shaping Postgres into what it is today. If you’d like to remember him, you can watch his visionary keynote he gave at PGConf.EU 2023 here.

I will always remember him, this, I know for sure. Thank you Simon, for everything.

Thank you for reading this far. I wanted to share more about talks I'd like to attend at the conference but it would not be fair as I actually voted for all these talks. Plus, the blog was already getting too long.

If you're attending the conference, I hope to see you around! Τα λέμε σύντομα στο συνέδριο! 🎉