Cracking Down the Code: What Really Happens When You Run a SELECT?
Presented by:
Charly Batista
Charly is passionate about databases and performance. He has been working with databases and development for over 20 years and has participated in many projects, from the design of a small sensor to count how many times a ball passes through a basketball hoop to complex database proxy applications.
Outside work, he loves sports, as a good Brazilian he practices football (or soccer), volleyball, and surprisingly ping-pong. Charly is also passionate about new cultures, their languages, and traditions, and has lived and/or worked in a few different countries. Today he basically lives between Brazil and China. Not really in between, but stays some time in Brazil and some time in China :D
No video of the event yet, sorry!
We all write SQL, but how many of us have looked under the hood of a relational database like PostgreSQL? This talk is a deep dive into the guts of the database engine, tracking a simple SELECT statement from the moment you hit "Enter" to the final result set.
We'll lift the veil on the core components: the parser, the planner (and the optimizer's black magic!), and the executor, and see how they transform a text string into a low-level, high-performance operation. Using a live, interactive session on a PostgreSQL instance, we'll expose the role of the shared buffer cache, explain why an index works (or doesn't), explore the true cost of I/O, and understand the significance of the binary log (WAL) on read operations.
Whether you're a developer frustrated with slow queries or a database administrator looking to squeeze out every millisecond of performance, you'll leave this talk with a mental model that demystifies query execution and gives you the knowledge to write queries that fly.
- Date:
- Duration:
- 50 min
- Room:
- Conference:
- Postgres Conference: 2026
- Language:
- Track:
- Ops
- Difficulty:
- Medium