Using Postgres to locate the best coffee near you! โ
Presented by:
Varun Dhawan
Varun Dhawan is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, with a wealth of experience in the realm of relational databases, particularly focusing on Azure PostgreSQL. With over 20 years of expertise in enterprise database systems, including PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle, Varun brings a comprehensive understanding of diverse database technologies to his role.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Varun held pivotal positions at Target Corp. as a DevOps engineer and at McKinsey as an Database SRE, honing his skills in Data Platforms, Observability, Database-as-a-Service, and Cloud platform. Alongside his professional commitments, Varun passionately shares his knowledge through his insightful blog. You can explore his writing on his personal blog http://data-nerd.blog and team blog https://aka.ms/azurepostgresblog.
No video of the event yet, sorry!
This talk demonstrates how PostgreSQL can be used to answer real-world questions like: โ๐ช๐ต๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฒโ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐๐ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ณ๐ณ๐ฒ๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ผ๐ฝ ๐ป๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ ๐บ๐ฒ?โ by ๐ฐ๐ผ๐บ๐ฏ๐ถ๐ป๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ฝ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐ฑ๐ฎ๐๐ฎ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐ผ๐ฟ ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ป๐ด๐.
The session introduces how PostGIS and pgvector work together to enable natural-language style queries over geographic data. Attendees will learn how vector data can enhance traditional geospatial queries by adding semantic context, not just distance or location.
Through a hands-on demo, Iโll show how to: - Store and query geographic data in PostgreSQL - Generate and use vector embeddings - Combine spatial filters with semantic search to produce more relevant results
The demo uses a practical coffee-shop dataset curated for Chicago downtown, to illustrate how these techniques can be applied to build intuitive, location-aware applications.
By the end of the session, attendees will understand how to apply PostgreSQLโs spatial and vector capabilities to their own use cases, enabling smarter, more user-friendly search experiences.
- Date:
- Duration:
- 50 min
- Room:
- Conference:
- Postgres Conference: 2026
- Language:
- Track:
- Dev
- Difficulty:
- Medium