Why attend PGConf.EU? My feedback from Valencia

This week I was in Valencia for the PGConf.EU 2026, the biggest PostgreSQL conference in Europe.

Something surprised me right at the start. During the welcome session on the first day, the organizers asked who was attending for the first time, and around 30% of the room raised their hand! I don’t know exactly what it means, maybe more companies are moving to PostgreSQL, maybe more young people are joining the community. But for sure it means a lot of new people, new ideas and new conversations, and that’s a very good sign for PostgreSQL.

Open Source projects you can use directly

Many developers presented their own open source PostgreSQL projects. After the session, you can directly download them for free, use them, and contribute to them!

For passionate people, this is a real added value. You can play with the tool right away, without having to contact a salesperson who will not leave you alone afterwards 🙂. And if it fits your needs, you can simply use it in your daily work, without asking for a budget first!

I tried to count them, and I found more than 15 sessions where the project is directly available on GitHub. Some examples:

• pg-storage-visualizer (storage internals)
• pgstream (CDC)
• pg_track_optimizer (bad query plans)
• radar (diagnostic snapshots)
• pg_acm (access control)

And many more.

Real experience from the field

Many technical sessions were about real projects, where the speakers shared their experience with PostgreSQL.

I noticed that there are still a lot of sessions about migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL. I thought the rush was over, but no, there are still many use cases. What changed is the type of database: today more and more big and critical Oracle environments are starting to leave Oracle. But in most cases these are still databases without too much code inside (PL/SQL). This remains the biggest challenge to leave Oracle.

Not only Oracle! we also see more and more customers migrating from DB2 to PostgreSQL, often companies that never made the jump to Oracle in the past, and now go directly to PostgreSQL 🙂

Current trends from the community

There were a lot of sessions about the new PostgreSQL 19 features. Sometimes the presentations were a little bit redundant (REPACK, REPACK, and again REPACK 🙂). But at least we know now which feature will push people to migrate to PostgreSQL 19: REPACK in core!

Sponsor booths

Between the sessions, the sponsor area was also a very good place to meet people, where I had the opportunity to visit some of our partners, like dbtune, and discuss new topics and opportunities with them. These discussions are often as valuable as the sessions themselves, because you get direct feedback and you can talk about real customer use cases!

And AI?

Today, everybody talks about AI. At the conference, it was mainly a topic for the sponsors and not so much for the community (with some exceptions, like the fun “Dungeon Master with Postgres and MCP” session). More and more services come with AI integration, but I don’t think many of them are already used in production. And above all, I didn’t hear any real customer feedback about them yet!

Evening in Valencia

PGconf.eu it’s also a good opportunity to discover a new place in Europe. I have to say, that I was very positively surprised by Valencia! it’s a very pleasant city, with a lot of culture and history. And after the sessions, it’s also the perfect place to go out for dinner with other participants, where the discussions around PostgreSQL will continue with a beer 🙂

Conclusion

Overall, I would say that PGConf.EU is still the best place to see where PostgreSQL is going, and above all to meet the people who build it. For dbi services it was also a great event as a Silver Sponsor, and I also had the chance to present OMrun in the sponsor lightning talks.

If you have never been there, I can only recommend it. See you next year!

We are hiring PostgreSQL consultants !

If you want to work with PostgreSQL every day and go to conferences like PGConf.EU, join us! At dbi services we are looking for PostgreSQL consultants to work with our customers on HA setups, performance tuning, migrations, Kubernetes and much more.

👉 Open Infrastructure Consultant