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The PostgresConf team wanted to provide some information on the performance of PostgresConf US 2018 and events over the past year, as well as potentially answer some pending questions. Ultimately our goals are about people, which is why our motto is, "People, Postgres, Data." With each event we hold, each talk we accept, and how we train our volunteers, we make sure people (the benefit for and to), postgres, and data are considered and included. If there is no benefit or consideration to the growth of people, it is not an option.

• Philadelphia 
• Ohio (in combination with Ohio Linux Fest) 
• South Africa 
• Seattle 
• Austin 
• Jersey City (PostgresConf US 2018) 
• Nepal 

PostgresConf US 2018

Logistics

• Days: 5, 2 for training, 3 for Breakout sessions and summits
• Official Attendance #: 601
• Content: Over 207 sessions submitted
• Sessions: Over 108 sessions provided 

Partner Support (Sponsors): 28

Diversity

Professional Growth

We held a Career and Talent Fair. A dozen companies were present to connect with potential employees.

We also held a surprisingly well attended speed mentoring session for potential employees (Especially helpful for many of the WWC) on resumes and interview practices.

Leadership

This year saw the continued elevation of our primary leadership: Viral Shah, Lloyd Albin, Amanda Nystrom, and Debra Cerda. They continued to increase their presence and responsibility within the conference and dedicated hundreds of hours voluntarily to the growth of people. Our international members have also increased their leadership roles with our on-the-ground teams in South Africa and China.

Summits

We had our standard Regulated Industry Summit but also a Greenplum Summit. As I am sure you are aware Greenplum is an Open Source, Postgres based MPP database. They were by far the most popular booth in the entire conference and their summit was very well attended. The relationship with Pivotal and the success of the Greenplum Summit allowed us to learn new ways to bring together the entire Postgres Ecosystem. We expect to run a minimum of 3 more summits at PostgresConf US 2019.

Contribution

We were able to have several excellent (and long) meetings with leaders of Pivotal, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon on how they can begin contributing more back to Postgresql.org. All of them expressed a deep drive to contribute and a desire to learn more about the core community. Of particular note is Google, who would like to contribute the following back to the community:

https://github.com/google/pg_page_verification

We discussed with them the process and various changes they would need to make (license and code style, etc.). We also educated them on the PostgreSQL.Org rigorous review process.

Microsoft is reviewing how they can contribute but they showed an interest in build farm nodes, professional technical writers to help with docs, and potentially code contribution to our Windows port.

International Collaboration

The Chinese Open Source Promotion Union launched the Chinese Postgres Association. We invited them to PostgresConf US and introduced them to the United States Community. We expect great things from the Chinese community in the future.

Future

As we continue to build up our on-the-ground teams, we will likely hold less events in the U.S. this year. We will instead be focused on a smaller number of events in the U.S. and adding events in China and Europe. We have had an amazing amount of support from the Chinese community and the current goal is 1000 attendees for that conference.

Our current plan of events for the U.S. are

• San Jose (October 2018) 
• Philadelphia 
• PostgresConf US (Manhattan) 

Future International Events

• October 2018. 
• Spring of 2019. 
• Spring of 2019. 

This may change as we are actively recruiting on-the-ground teams to help us grow the community.

Collaboration

Our goal is collaboration and growth with other PostgreSQL community and Ecosystem efforts. We want to allow each potential community member to find a home. A place that they feel positive about contributing to the community as a whole. As we continue to grow as a community, it is vital to recognize that each member has their own needs, desires, and return on investment requirement (professional or personal) that they are seeking.

Tidbits of note

• Pivotal went public during PostgresConf US 2018. 
• We (PostgreSQL and PostgresConf) were picked up by ZDNet during the conference
• Another flattering article about PostgreSQL

On DBEngines PostgreSQL is the 4th most popular database but the significance is that of the other 3, we are the only ones that are growing in popularity. 

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

Abbas Butt is a Software Architect at EnterpriseDB, and he will present a half-day training "Deep dive into PostgreSQL Authentication Methods" on Monday, April 16, at 1 pm. Learn more about Abbas and his involvement in the Postgres community:

Why PostgreSQL?

My company's business revolves around PostgreSQL.

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community.

I have been involved with PostgreSQL for about 10 years. Over the years I have contributed by reporting bugs and developing various FDWs. I have also worked to make PostgreSQL an XA complaint database by using a modified version of pgBouncer. My next plans are to come up with small programming exercises with solutions to accompany this book http://www.interdb.jp/pg/ ("The Internals of PostgreSQL for database administrators and system developers"  by Hironobu Suzuki). This will give the readers hands on experience.

What new features of PostgreSQL 10 are you most excited about?

Declarative table partitioning & query parallelism

What features should be developed/improved and released in the next major upgrade?

Write Scalability and High Availability

Why should attendees come to your talk at PostgresConf US 2018? What would you like for them to take away from your session?

Attendees should come to have great time learning about PostgreSQL authentication methods. After attending the session the attendees will be better placed to decide which authentication scheme should they use and why.

What sessions are you most excited about attending at PostgresConf US 2018?

"Aurora PostgreSQL Tutorial and Extended Deep Dive" and "Know your meme: Develop a webapp using Google Cloud Kubernetes and Cloud SQL"

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

Being able to listen and exchange point of views with other community members.

What advice would you have for a Computer Science graduate or entry level developer who are interested in learning and engaging with Postgres?

Read this book : "The Internals of PostgreSQL for database administrators and system developers"  by Hironobu Suzuki.

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about our Diamond and Platinum sponsors for this year in our Sponsor Spotlight Series.

Heikki Linnakangas is the Senior Principal Software Engineer at Pivotal, one of our Diamond Sponsors for PostgresConf US 2018 and host of the Greenplum Summit. Read what Heikki has to say about Pivotal, Greenplum and Postgres:

As a PostgreSQL committer, how does that influence your work with Greenplum?

We have worked hard on merging more recent PostgreSQL versions into Greenplum in the last couple of years, and reached PostgreSQL 8.4 recently. PostgreSQL 8.4 was first released back in 2008, which is the same year I became a committer in the PostgreSQL project. It was a real blast from the past, to see those first commits of my own flow into the Greenplum repository!

It's a healthy reminder that whatever shortcuts you might be tempted to take, they will come back to haunt you! Fortunately, my fellow PostgreSQL committers are hawk-eyed, and the PostgreSQL commit history is very clean and pleasant to work with.

Do you foresee more collaboration between PostgreSQL and Greenplum in the future?

Yes! As we continue to catch up Greenplum with more recent PostgreSQL versions, the friction of collaboration gets smaller and smaller. In the last couple of years, PostgreSQL has gotten a lot of the basic infrastructure that Greenplum relies on for data distribution, like partitioning and parallelism. That reduces the manpower needed in Greenplum to maintain those features as addons, and frees up developers to work on other things.

As we plan for new Greenplum features, we always try to design them in a way that works well with PostgreSQL, and if applicable, develop them in the PostgreSQL community first. That benefits the PostgreSQL community, by having the features, and it benefits Greenplum, by getting more eyes on the code earlier, which improves code quality.

Are there things that you feel that PostgreSQL can learn from Greenplum? What about Greenplum from PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL can learn a lot from the features that are in Greenplum, but not yet in PostgreSQL. Usually, the code is not directly applicable, and Greenplum might have made different tradeoffs than the PostgreSQL community wants. But it is nevertheless very useful to look at existing implementations for inspiration, and to learn from the mistakes.

Pivotal has a well-established process for making minor Greenplum releases, emergency bug fixes and such. But between Greenplum 4, and Greenplum 5, the first open source version of Greenplum, there was a long gap. With Greenplum 5, we had to re-learn how to make a major release. PostgreSQL, on the other hand, has maintained a very stable and predictable release process for over 15 years, with roughly annual major version releases, and a 5 year support period for each major version. We are trying to get to a similar stable, predictable, schedule with Greenplum as well.

What challenges have you faced as you continue to push Greenplum toward code parity with PostgreSQL?

At first, we spent a lot of time on just cleaning up the Greenplum codebase. Throughout the PostgreSQL 8.3 merge, which was the first major version upgrade we went through, we ironed out tons of trivial differences between the PostgreSQL and Greenplum code that had crept up over the years. Small changes in whitespace, comments, variable names, and such. Most were well-intended, and made sense on their own, but they hindered the merge.

We're mostly done with that kind of cleanup, and we now have an established process for merging a major PostgreSQL version. But each version has its own challenges. With the PostgreSQL 8.4 merge, for example, PostgreSQL got window functions, and we had to reconcile the existing Greenplum implementation, with the implementation we were getting from PostgreSQL.

With the on-going PostgreSQL 9.1 merge, we will get Foreign Data Wrappers into Greenplum. We will have to decide what it means to have a foreign table in an MPP context. Do you run the foreign table only in the master node? That's straightforward, but you will get no MPP benefits. Or do you have each data segment fetch their own slice of the foreign data? That requires extending Foreign Data Wrapper API, and we need to do that in a way that's compatible with the whole ecosystem of existing PostgreSQL data wrappers.

Mason Sharp, from Maputo Data, is actually giving a presentation on how Postgres-XL and Postgres-XC are distributing Foreign Data Wrappers. I'll be there! This is a great opportunity to work together on a common API, so that the same FDW extension will work consistently with PostgreSQL, as well as all the forks like Postgres-XL and Greenplum.

Are there any specific goals you would like to highlight for collaboration with both communities over the next year?

Developers from EnterpriseDB announced plans to work on a new heap format called "zheap", for PostgreSQL v12. It would address many of the problems with "vacuuming" large tables. Vacuuming is cumbersome, when you scale up to hundreds of terabytes of data or more. Greenplum has largely solved that problem with a custom storage format called Append-Optimized Tables. But we would prefer to not maintain a custom storage format, we'd rather focus on making Greenplum better on MPP things, like parallelizing queries across a cluster. So we will be looking closely at the development of zheap, and want to help.

What sessions are you most excited about attending at PostgresConf US 2018?

I'm looking forward to hear stories from Greenplum customers, how they use the product, what problems they have. I don't speak enough to users! It's easy to lose sight of what day-to-day problems DBAs and application developers face.

I'm also excited about the career fair on Friday. I'm hoping to meet many new colleagues and future PostgreSQL developers there!

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

It's my first time, so we'll see! :-) I go to many PostgreSQL developer-oriented conferences, to meet developer colleagues, and talk about upcoming features and engineering issues. In this conference, I'm hoping to hear more from DBAs and users.

Any final thoughts?

If you want to hear more war stories on Greenplum or PostgreSQL development, or have a weird PostgreSQL issue you want to show, or just want to say "hi!", come speak to me! You'll find me loitering around the halls.

 About Pivotal:

Pivotal drives software innovation for many of the world’s most admired brands. With millions of users in communities around the world, Pivotal technology touches billions of users every day.

Pivotal is the maker of Pivotal Greenplum, the world’s first fully-featured, multi-cloud, massively parallel processing (MPP) data analytics platform based on the open source Greenplum Database and Postgres. Pivotal Greenplum provides comprehensive and integrated analytics on multi-structured data. Powered by the world’s most advanced cost-based query optimizer, Pivotal Greenplum delivers unmatched analytical query performance on massive volumes of data.

PostgreSQL is the best open source operational (OLTP) database on the planet, but many PostgreSQL users are forced to work with proprietary analytical databases (e.g. Oracle or Teradata) for their data warehousing and big data workloads. Greenplum Database offers a proven path of migration from expensive and proprietary alternatives to the Postgres ecosystem.

Pivotal at PostgresConf US:

Heikki will be presenting "Greenplum Overview for Postgres Hackers" on Wednesday, April 18, at 10:30 am. Check out all the Greenplum Summit and related content. Stop by and visit the Pivotal team in the Exhibit Hall on Wednesday, April 18, and Thursday, April 19, in the Newport Ballroom, as well as at the Talent Exchange & Career Fair on Friday, April 20, from 10:30 am - 1:30 pm in the Newport Foyer on the 3rd floor.

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

• Amazon
• Pivotal
• 2ndQuadrant
• Microsoft
• Timescale
• HighGo
• Data Dog
• Fivetran
• BlueTalon
• Goldman Sachs
• forhims
• Immuta

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about about featured Platinum Sponsor 2ndQuadrant, including their commitment to partnering with and contributing to the Postgres community, from Simon Riggs, Chief Technology Officer, of 2ndQuadrant and PostgreSQL Major Developer/Committer:

Tell us about your commitment to the PostgreSQL Community.

The 2ndQuadrant vision is to be the bridge between the database needs of enterprise users and open source contributions to PostgreSQL. We have pursued a joint strategy of providing both working code (available now) and later submitting the features into core PostgreSQL. Over the past 15+ years, our team has widely contributed to the growth and development of the PostgreSQL project; partnering with customers to identify bottlenecks and then contribute towards enterprise features that address them in PostgreSQL, benefiting everyone that uses it. Besides contributing code, all members of the 2ndQuadrant team are very active in the community on an individual and local level, often helping to organize PUG events, conferences, and meetups.

Are there any rising stars in the community you’d like to give props to? 

Marco Nenciarini - located in Prato, Italy - has been a long time supporter and contributor of PostgreSQL. He is an active maintainer of PGDG’s APT repository, maintaining builds and binaries for PostgreSQL and associated tools & extensions, while contributing towards process improvement for sane builds. Marco is the lead developer for Barman, a backup manager and disaster recovery tool for enterprises with high business continuity requirements.  He is the current president of IT.PUG in Italy and a part of the organizing committee for PGDay.IT.

What features would you like to see in v11 and v12?

As PostgreSQL matures, so do the features that come with each release. In the next two release we’re most looking forward to improved Partitioning performance, the implementation of the MERGE SQL command, and procedures that allow server-side transactions.

Are there any features in development from 2ndQuadrant that the community should be looking forward to?

2ndQuadrant is working hard on the development of Bi-Directional Replication (BDR3), containing new architectural features and a wide and deep set of features.

In addition, we continuously work on features for scalability, performance, security and robustness.

What is the number one barrier you see to contributing to the Postgres community?

The Postgres community is one of the easiest communities to become a part of. With an open mindset all around and a common goal of growing open source PostgreSQL, the community is very accepting to anyone looking to learn, contribute, and better the Postgres ecosystem as a whole. Between the helpful tools on postgresql.org and the growing community, comprised of seasoned veterans and fresh faces, there is always helpful information to guide you.

What is the best thing about working with the Postgres community?

PostgreSQL is the most popular database when it comes to new adoption. Even existing users of other databases are flocking towards PostgreSQL - and it’s not just to save money. PostgreSQL has been growing year on year and we’re attracting interest from the largest enterprises, as it is fully capable of securely supporting enterprise database systems. 

There is still competition out there, especially with the current fad of developer-focused NoSQL databases. But the community is big enough and strong enough to quickly adapt to changing times and push forwards. The members of the PostgreSQL community are passionate about their work and the growth of the project.

Tell us why you believe people should attend PostgresConf 2018 in April.

Community conferences expand your knowledge in different areas of the technology, describe practical use cases as well as give sneak previews into cutting edge technologies for future versions of PostgreSQL. 

Simon along with Tom Kincaid, General Manager of 2ndQuadrant, presents "Internet of Things with PostgreSQL - Performance & Security" on Friday, April 20, at 8:50 am. Tom also presents "Postgres -- Past, Present and Future" and will discuss the challenges that may be faced by Postgres in the next 5 years on Thursday, April 19, at 3:20 pm. 

Visit the 2ndQuadrant team in the Exhibit Hall in the Newport Grand Ballroom on Wednesday, April 18, and Thursday, April 19.  

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

PostgresConf US 2018 is in 9 days. Here is the obligatory "Buy your tickets" reminder! If you look around (a Google search of Gold sponsor Google Cloud is a good place to start) you will find a lot of discount codes.

In 2017 we launched a community wide effort to better recognize contributors for not only the conference but the wider Postgres Community. We continued this effort in 2018 and are pleased to have many speaker profiles available, with more being published every day:

• Les McMonagle
• Malcolm McLean
• Elizabeth Zalman
• Hubert Zhang of Pivotal
• Baron Schwartz
• Jignesh Shah
• Tim Gorman
• Tom Limoncelli

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about about featured Platinum Sponsor Microsoft, including their commitment to partnering with and contributing to the Postgres community:

You are newer in the Postgres community. Tell us how you contribute (or how you plan to).

We are excited to be working with PostgreSQL community. We would love to partner with the community to bring our experience, from building SQL Server over the years, to PostgreSQL – and to learn in areas where PostgreSQL excels. We have already engaged on pgsql-hackers mailing list and working with the community on patches. Moving forward, we will continue to contribute back and partner with the community in the service of our customers. As we look forward, the possibilities of what we can work together on are amazing.

How do you foresee yourself helping the Postgres community?

As mentioned above, we would love to share our learnings from working on SQL Server with the PostgreSQL community. While there are many areas that we can work on together with the community, a couple of areas to highlight would be connectivity for the cloud and making PostgreSQL more robust and compatible in Windows development environment.

What challenges did you face building AzureDB?

A key learning for us while working on Azure Database for PostgreSQL has been that the fundamental needs of the CIO from any database in the cloud is quite similar – cost saving, fundamentals like reliability, performance and scale, as well as security. In the 9 months between preview and general availability, we heard similar feedback again and again from customers and worked on these key areas. For example, we ensures that there is built-in HA so developers can be confident of their customer experience. Similarly we ensure that we have worldwide but also local compliance to serve customer needs across the globe.  

What goals do you have for the Postgres community?

Microsoft’s mission is to enable every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. To make this mission meaningful for our customers, we intend to meet them where they are, helping them to be productive with the technologies and tools of their choice. PostgreSQL has a strong community and is one of the most loved open source databases, bringing industry leading innovations to customers.

What is the number one barrier you see to contributing to the Postgres community?

For us this is start of an important and enduring journey and so far we have had great support from the community.

What is the best thing about working with the Postgres community?

PostgreSQL is a global community with talented engineers. So the best things about working with the community is the learning and sharing of experiences with the some great minds.

Tell us why you believe people should attend PostgresConf 2018 in April.

Because it is the best place to learn, interact, and network with everyone working on Postgres – either building Postgres or users of Postgres.

About Microsoft:

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. With its Data & AI solutions, Microsoft enables developers to easily build and deliver intelligent apps by offering productive and familiar tools to integrate data and built-in AI. To offer more choice and flexibility to developers, Microsoft has now introduced Azure Database for PostgreSQL, a PaaS offering for PostgreSQL.

Mark Bolz, Principal Program Manager with the Microsoft Azure Data Group, presents "General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with Azure Database for PostgreSQL" on Wednesday, April 18 at 4:30 pm. Principal Program Manager Sunil Kamath presents "Combine the Power of Community PostgreSQL and Microsoft Azure to Migrate Existing or Build New Apps" on Friday, April 20 at 12:50 pm -- see event listing for location (subject to change).

Rohan Kumar, Corporate Vice President of Azure Data at Microsoft, will present the Microsoft keynote on April 19 at 3:40 pm, in the Newport Grand Ballroom. Visit the Microsoft team in the Exhibit Hall in the Newport Grand Ballroom on Wednesday, April 18, and Thursday, April 19.  

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

Les McMonagle is the VP of Security Strategy, at BlueTalon Inc. He will be presenting "Achieving Data Privacy Compliance in Postgres or Greenplum" on Friday, April 20, at 10:50 am. Attend his session to learn  the difference between Data Protection versus Data Access Control – and why you should care, and read what he has to say about PostgreSQL and Greenplum:

Why PostgreSQL?

BlueTalon's Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) technology has been developed to fully support PostgreSQL and Greenplum because these are broadly implemented data analytics platforms used for storing and processing of sensitive or regulated data across industries.    

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community.

PostgreSQL was one of the first platforms BlueTalon developed an Enforcement Point (EP) for to provide centrally managed, consistently applied fine-grained data access controls, audit trail and accountability for all access to sensitive or regulated data stored in PostgreSQL database platforms. 

What new features of PostgreSQL 10 are you most excited about?

BlueTalon ensures full compatibility with each new release and corresponding new features or functionality for PostgreSQL as part of our standard certification process. 

Why should attendees come to your talk at PostgresConf US 2018? What would you like for them to take away from your session?

To learn about next generation data access controls for relational databases and  other data repository platforms and how this ABAC technology integrates seamlessly with PostgresSQL and other database technologies.

What sessions are you most excited about attending at PostgresConf US 2018?

Any data security related sessions.

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

Firsthand contact and interaction with technology thought leaders at global corporations. 

What advice would you have for a Computer Science graduate or entry level developer who are interested in learning and engaging with Postgres?

Consider all aspects of designing and implementing any data analytics platform including data protection and access control.  "Privacy by Design" should be a core component of any requirements gathering and system design process.  Data security is an order of magnitude easier and less expensive to build in than it is to try and bolt on later.   

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about the engaging content and our Diamond and Platinum sponsors for this year in our Sponsor Spotlight Series.

Brad Nicholson is a database engineer and the PostgreSQL team lead at Compose, an IBM Company, which is one of our Platinum Sponsors for PostgresConf US 2018. Compose runs a PostgreSQL as a service platform, and has long been a supporter of the Postgres community through contributions and support. Read what Brad has to say about Compose and Postgres:

Tell us about your commitment and contribution to the Postgres Community.

Postgres is a big part of our business, and one that is rapidly growing.  As such, our  commitment is pretty self-explanatory – we are committed to postgres and the PG Community. Basically, the better PG is/becomes, the better product we can build on top of it. Our biggest contribution to the community is probably Governor.  While we have since deprecated that project, Patroni is a fork of it, and uses the HA template we created with Governor. 


What particular challenges did you face when building multi platform deployments with Postgres?

Lack of management API was one of the biggest challenges.  This leads to less than desirable patterns like having to run Patroni and Postgres in the same container, effectively tying the lifecycle of the two together. There are also a number of places where log parsing is still required to ensure the validity of an operation (like ensuring PITR \ restores actually restored to the point you specified).  These sorts of patterns are challenging to handle and often lead to less than desirable architectural patterns at the platform level.

What growth pattern do you expect for yourself as well as Postgres as a whole?

I've been using Postgres since 2001. To watch its growth over the years has been impressive, especially over the past few years.

Postgres has long established itself as the number one Open Source RDBMS.  With the huge shift we have seen towards open source adoption in the past several years, I only see it's growth continuing to accelerate.

As an organizer of the Toronto Postgres User Group I'd personally like to get more involved in the community again.  I'm not a C developer, so advocacy and helping people out via the lists/slack/etc where I can.  Now that we've deprecated Governor, I'm also looking forward to contributing to the Patroni project more.

What features would you like to see in v11 and v12?

My number one ask is Failover Slots.  Without them, it makes it difficult to for us to give our customers access to Logical Replication and Logical Decoding.  We use streaming replication for HA, and abstract those details away from our users. A HA failover will break whatever systems are built on these constructs - we lose the replication slot that maintains the place in the decoding stream, most likely requiring a resync of the dependent systems.  That is not a great story for people building downstream systems.

The other thing I'd love to see is connection pooling in core.  This has been a huge Achilles heel in Postgres for ages. Pgbouncer and pgPool are nice products to help work around the limitations, but they are severely limited when it comes to multi-tenant systems.These systems frequently need to spread their connections out across multiple users and/or multiple databases within a given cluster. Because we can't share these connections via external pools, we end up with connection explosions. 

What is the number one barrier you see to contributing to the Postgres community?

 Not a very exciting answer, but time. There just aren't enough hours in the day to fit everything in.

What is the best thing about working with the Postgres community?

How helpful, open and responsive the people in the Community are.  When you have a question or problem, getting direct access to people via the mailing lists, Slack, etc is great.  Often you'll be talking with the folks that wrote the code in the first place.  People are always really helpful.

Tell us why you believe people should attend PostgresConf 2018 in April.

This conference is an amazing opportunity to learn about all sort of different areas from the experts.  Meeting folks face to face is always another huge benefit.

Visit the Compose team in the Exhibit Hall in the Newport Grand Ballroom on Wednesday, April 18, and Thursday, April 19.  IBM Senior Developer Advocate Raj Singh will present  "Do data science and machine learning with Postgres on the IBM Cloud" in his keynote on April 19 at 3 pm, which also takes place in the Newport Grand Ballroom.

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!

As part of the countdown to PostgresConf US 2018, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

Malcolm McLean of Apace Systems is a PostgreSQL DBA, Linux admin, Java/PHP developer and according to his bio "a bit of a pedantic perfectionist", with over 12 years of experience with PostgreSQL and somewhat more than that with Linux and development.

Malcolm is presenting "PostgreSQL in a Geographically Distributed Realtime Transactional System" on Thursday, April 19, at 11:20 am. Read what he has to say about Postgres and why to attend his session: 

Why PostgreSQL?

My very first job over 13 years ago introduced me to Postgres after having only worked with MySQL at university. Since then, I've been happier with its performance compared to other DB's I've benchmarked as well as with the features that are continuously introduced to keep the database on the forefront. Across 3 companies I have never looked back and never regretted my decision to always use Postgres.

Tell us about your involvement with the greater Postgres community.

I spoke at the first PgConf South Africa last year and I'm now one of the organisers of PostgresConf South Africa 2018.

What new features of PostgreSQL 10 are you most excited about?

Definitely the integrated logical replication without the need of an extension.

What features should be developed/improved and released in the next major upgrade?

It perhaps won't make Postgres 11, but at least by Postgres 12 we should have BDR integrated with the current logical replication capabilities rounded off.

Why should attendees come to your talk at PostgresConf US 2018? What would you like for them to take away from your session?

We had an interesting replication problem to solve. Multi-master replication where data needed to be replicated betweens servers in multiple countries, some with data restrictions, but without replicating data where it didn't need to go. So a sort of conditional sharding with redundancy in each data center.

What sessions are you most excited about attending at PostgresConf US 2018?

 The talks on replication (anything to make our lives easier) and security. 

What is your favorite aspect of PostgresConf US?

Meeting like-minded people from different backgrounds. And of course, the trip itself. I've done quite a bit of travelling over the years, but I haven't yet been to the US.

What advice would you have for a Computer Science graduate or entry level developer who are interested in learning and engaging with Postgres?

Push yourself to learn. Sitting back doesn't get you very far. 

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2018, and buy your tickets soon!