Prague PostgreSQL Meetup on September 30th

Besides working at Xata, I am also the main organizer of the monthly Prague PostgreSQL Meetup. I am thrilled to invite you to the fifth meetup of 2024, taking place on Monday, September 30th, at 18:00. If you are in the area, please join us for an evening of engaging talks, networking, and refreshments.

I visited Prague for the first time in 2015 and I instantly fell in love with the city. I am happy to say, I was lucky to move here two years later and I have been living in this beautiful city since then!

I am also known to be a bit of a Postgres enthusiast, and I have been using Postgres in one form or another since 2012. When I started working at 2ndQuadrant in 2015, I became friends with Tomas Vondra, who also happens to be a Postgres enthusiast. We both are community-oriented people and one day when we were talking I brought up doing a PostgreSQL meetup in Prague. It turns out that there was already a meetup co-founded by Tomas, with Pavel Stehule, but it was not active anymore. Being the excited persona that I am, I decided to take a lead on reviving the meetups and organize regular monthly meetups! Over the years, we built a strong community who did not seem to mind meeting every month to discuss Postgres 😊

I am very proud to say that I've organized 21 meetups since 2018, with the unavoidable breaks due to the pandemic. I feel fortunate to be surrounded by friends, colleagues, and other Postgres community members who are supportive of the meetups and have traveled from around the world to give talks at Prague PostgreSQL Meetup.

We have had talks by people who live in Prague, people who visited Prague just for the meetup, all coming together to share their knowledge and experience with the community. Some of the names you might know, who have given talks in Prague PostgreSQL Meetup, are:

• Ales Zeleny
• Alicja Kucharczyk
• Andreas Scherbaum
• Antonin Houska
• Chris Ellis
• Dani Yelovitch
• Devrim Gündüz
• Esteban Moscoso
• Gianni Ciolli
• Gulcin Yildirim Jelinek
• Hans-Jürgen Schönig
• Ilya Kosmodemiansky
• Lætitia Avrot
• Magnus Hagander
• Markus Winand
• Mikey Ariel
• Nina Belyavskaya
• Oleksii Kliukin
• Pavlo Golub
• Pavel Stehule
• Peter Eisentraut
• Petr Jelinek
• Roman Fišer
• Sasha Aliashkevich
• Stefanie Janine Stölting
• Tomas Barton
• Tomas Vondra
• ... and many more!

I want to thank everyone who has given a talk at the meetup, and everyone who has attended the meetup over the years! I think the list above is just a small testament to the fact that Postgres is a community-driven project, and the Prague PostgreSQL Meetup is a microcosm of that spirit. What is the most fascinating for me is that most of these people came to the meetup by taking days-off from work, covering the travel and hotel costs themselves, just to contribute to the community in Prague. For this, I will be forever grateful and I am always looking for opportunities to visit different meetups organized by other community members around the world!

This meetup will be the fifth one we organized this year, and we are back to the regular schedule of one meetup per month after the summer break! We usually host each meetup at the last Monday of the month, at 18:00, at a venue that kindly hosts us. This time, we will be at Microsoft's office in Prague 4, thanks to our friends from Microsoft who helped us secure the venue.

We have an exciting lineup of speakers for this event:

• Adam Wolk is a Principal Program Manager for PostgreSQL at Microsoft. With a diverse background that spans over a decade in various roles, Adam’s journey includes working with Oracle PL/SQL in the financial sector, contributing to OpenBSD, and delving deep into PostgreSQL internals. His talk will provide insights into advanced search capabilities in PostgreSQL and the integration of AI technologies.

• Mayuresh Bagayatkar is a Database Specialist at Veeam in Prague, with an impressive 15 years of DBA experience, including a notable stint at Wise. Mayuresh is passionate about database performance tuning, a puzzle-like challenge he enjoys immensely. His talk will explore the transition from Oracle to PostgreSQL, sharing valuable lessons from his real-world experiences.

• 17:30 - Doors open
• 18:00 – Opening Talk by Gulcin Yildirim Jelinek
• 18:15 – From Postgres Full Text Search to Retrieval Augmented Generative Search by Adam Wolk
• 19:00 – Oracle to Postgres: Happily Ever After by Mayuresh Bagayatkar
• 20:00 – End of talks
• 21:00 - Closing, end of networking

• Adam Wolk will take you through a fascinating journey from basic PostgreSQL full text search to the cutting-edge capabilities of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Learn about the design and inner workings of search documents, the pgvector extension, and the innovative azure_ai extension available in Azure Database for PostgreSQL. And meet Milly the Mailiphant, your new go-to for PostgreSQL questions!

• Mayuresh Bagayatkar will share his experience of migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL, discussing the motivations, benefits, and challenges encountered during the transition. This talk is perfect for anyone considering a similar move or interested in the practical aspects of database migration.

Hope to see everyone in and around Prague joining us on the 30th of September for the meetup! If you aren't a member yet, feel free to register here: Prague PostgreSQL Meetup