Slonik on the Catwalk: PGConf.EU 2025 Recap
I volunteered as a room host and Slonik guide.
Best gig: posing our elephant. The photographer had runway-level ideas. Slonik delivered every single time.
Community Day ~ people > hype
- PostgreSQL & AI Summit: I sat on the panel and played “Team Human” vs Skynet (As advised by John Connor in the future).
postgresql.eu - “Establishing the PostgreSQL standard: What’s Postgres compatible?”
Half-day workshop, lot of brain storming and discussion split into groups then presenting your group’s conclusion on what makes postgres derivatives compatible with community postgres. We spun up a Telegram group to keep building the rubric post-conference. postgresql.eu
Coffee with CYBERTEC (meeting Laurenz Albe)
- Picked the “Coffee with CYBERTEC” option to meet Laurenz Albe, the most prolific Stack Overflow answerer.
- We traded notes on most popular features to adopt from other databases, their feasibility, and why Postgres avoided them historically.
I left with a starting map for contributing to core.
Talks I caught (and why they stuck)
“Don’t do that!” — Laurenz Albe
A rapid-fire list of Postgres anti-patterns. Simple, blunt, useful from the most beloved speaker of the conference. (postgresql.eu)
Parsing Postgres logs the non-pgBadger way — Kaarel Moppel
Meet pgweasel. Lean CLI. Fast. Cloud-friendly. For prod support, less noise beats glossy graphs. I’m convinced. (postgresql.eu)
https://github.com/kmoppel/pgweasel
Improved freezing in VACUUM — Melanie Plageman
Cleaner anti-wraparound story. Scan all-visible (not all-frozen) pages early; fewer emergency freezes later. Sensible, much needed change. (postgresql.eu)
Patroni + pgBackRest: better together — Stefan Fercot
Power couple of Postgres, best HA tool with best Backup tool. Tight HA+DR integration. Bootstrap from backups, safe standby rebuilds, PITR under Patroni’s control. (postgresql.eu)
DBTune: AI-driven tuning
Autonomous parameter tuning across self-hosted and managed Postgres. Looks mature enough for a lab trial. I’m tempted to test in QA. (postgresql.eu)
The SyncRep Detective Story
Fascinating detective story and scientific approach to tracing root cause. Resonated with my past setup where commit_delay/commit_siblings helped on AWS networked storage. (postgresql.eu)
MultiXacts: usage, side-effects, monitoring — Divya Sharma
Row-lock pileups and vacuum side effects, explained. We don’t hit them often in current company (rareSELECT … FOR UPDATE), but I left with better alarms to build. (postgresql.eu)
Fast-path locking in PG18 — Tomas Vondra
Shines with many relations and partitions. We’re light on partitioning at current company, so the gains will be modest for us. Still, good progress. (postgresql.eu)
Patroni: what the blog posts don’t tell you — Cameron Murdoch
The “missing manual”: hardening, proxies, DCS choices, failsafe option and upgrades. (postgresql.eu)
We have multiple concurrent versions of this title trying to understand MVCC (Boris Mejias)
It’s hard to describe this talk cause you have to experience it live to fully appreciate the second best database comedian in the world.
Tracking plan shapes over time — pg_stat_plans (Lukas Fittl)
Plan IDs + pg_stat_plans let you watch plan drift over time. This will be gold for catching plan fluctuations. (postgresql.eu)
https://github.com/pganalyze/pg_stat_plans
Conference vibe
Riga was friendly. Hallway track was lively. Slonik worked overtime and loved the camera. See you next year.
PS: If you are still suffering from Postgres conference hangover and crave more Postgres content then head over to Prague next month for Prague Postgres Meetup or in January for P2D2 conference.
