Here’s the following day 2 of the PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2024 in Athens, if you haven’t read the first day here is the link.
After a fantastic first day, I was excited to dive into the next day of the conference, which offered a mix of technical sessions that covered essential topics like upgrading PostgreSQL, handling statistics, and even taking DBA skills to the cloud.
Here are some of the highlights from the sessions I attended:
An Ultimate Guide to Upgrading Your PostgreSQL Installation
The day began with a thorough guide on PostgreSQL upgrades, focusing on best practices and critical steps to ensure a smooth upgrade process. One key takeaway was the need for logical replication during upgrades, emphasizing the requirement for primary keys on each table. The session underscored the importance of careful schema design, especially when aiming for minimal downtime during major version upgrades. This talk was very close to the subject I proposed and that I will blog about soon (Architecture for Seamless PostgreSQL Upgrades). The way upgrade best practices were exposed by Ilya Kosmodemiansky was very straightforward while I was taking the complicated approach explaining how Logical Replication is difficult and why you shouldn’t put yourself in the spot of having to rely on it. The presentation from Ilya helped me a lot as a speaker.
A Deep Dive into Postgres Statistics
This session took us into the inner workings of PostgreSQL’s statistics collection. Understanding how PostgreSQL gathers and utilizes statistics is fundamental for optimizing query performance, and this talk delivered just that. I enjoyed a lot the talk host Louise Grandjonc, she brought infectious enthusiasm that resonated with the audience ( the database she chose was about medical studies). Everyone could feel that she was passionate about PostgreSQL her view on statistics brought also some nice insights on the reason for some behavior by looking and the source code and doing the math yourself.
Porting On-Prem Performance Troubleshooting Skills to the Cloud
I was very interested by the subject of this talk from Denzil Ribeiro (Microsoft), I didn’t expect any big announcement other than allowing some additional Postgres feature into the Azure cloud. My mistake! This was huge for PostgreSQL Azure user and DBA seeking performance tuning tool on the cloud because it announced the first iteration for PostgreSQL Query Store ! For those who know and love this feature on SQL Server this is huge and having Microsoft porting such a feature in the PostgreSQL world is a big step for them even though it is Azure cloud-based and won’t be available in the PostgreSQL open source project… To me, this is actually quite fair on their part even, but it also means future improvements on auto_explain capabilities from Microsoft part to support this feature which is going to be so full of possibilities for performance tuners and other future open-source projects. For me, this will be good also for other on-premise products like PGanalyze. Denzil also announced future automation in query tuning advisor to complete this, using LLM-powered functionalities.
Demystifying Kubernetes for Postgres DBAs: A Guide to Operators
The final session of the day brought clarity to the complexities of managing PostgreSQL on Kubernetes. The speaker presented a guide to PostgreSQL operators in Kubernetes, explaining how operators can simplify database management in containerized environments. For those of us comfortable with on-prem or virtualized setups, it was a great introduction to how Kubernetes can support PostgreSQL with scalability and reliability. This talk helped demystify the Kubernetes landscape for DBAs, showing how operators can bridge the gap between traditional database administration and cloud-native practices.
Conclusion
Day two of the conference was packed with practical knowledge, from upgrading strategies to adapting cloud skills and navigating Kubernetes for PostgreSQL. Alongside the talks discussing with speakers and committers of the project, I found myself already part of this community which was and is very motivating!
Like any PostgreSQL conference, it was the occasion for me to get some new stickers and the goodies provided by the sponsors. Usually, I am not so much a fan of these things, but I couldn’t get past the conference t-shirt offered by pgconf.eu and the Microsoft Citus socks!