Debra Cerda Blog Posts

Core PostgreSQL knowledge compounds over time. Understanding data types, indexing strategies, query optimization, and transaction behavior provides value regardless of framework, application architecture, or PostgreSQL version.

The Essentials track at Postgres Conference: 2026 is dedicated to core PostgreSQL knowledge. If it's in the documentation or should be, this is where we explore it thoroughly.

This isn't beginner content. Every core concept has complexity worth understanding.

What You'll Learn in the Essentials Track

Data types beyond the basics. PostgreSQL's type system includes arrays, JSONB, ranges, and custom types that solve problems other databases punt to the application layer. Learn how to leverage these types effectively.

Indexing strategies that actually work. B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN, and hash indexes each exist for specific reasons. Understand when to use which, how to read EXPLAIN output, and when indexes hurt more than they help.

Query optimization fundamentals. Go beyond adding indexes. Understand the query planner, statistics, joins, and execution strategies to write performant queries from the start.

Transaction isolation in practice. MVCC, isolation levels, and locking behavior aren't just academic concepts. Learn how they affect real applications and how to prevent production incidents.

Documentation deep dives. PostgreSQL's documentation is legendary, but dense. Sessions in this track surface buried knowledge and make it actionable.

Topics in the Essentials Track

• Data types deep dives (JSONB, arrays, ranges, custom types)
• Indexing strategies and trade-offs
• Query optimization and EXPLAIN analysis
• Transaction management and isolation
• Constraints and data integrity patterns
• Configuration and tuning fundamentals
• Backup, restore, and recovery basics
• Security fundamentals
• SQL features that PostgreSQL does better
• And more!

Postgres Conference 2025 Essentials Track Highlights

Check out how presenters tackled complex PostgreSQL topics and get a preview of what to expect in 2026. Listen and watch Essentials track highlights in our Postgres Conference YouTube playlist.

Register for Postgres Conference: 2026

Postgres Conference 2026 takes place April 21-23 in San Jose, California. The theme is Energizing People with Data and Creativity. Understanding the fundamentals gives you the foundation to be creative.

Early bird registration is available now! Purchase your General Admission tickets here. 

Call for Postgres Conference 2026 Speakers & Trainers

Want to share your expertise? If you like to dive deep into PostgreSQL fundamentals and can help others understand them, we want to hear from you. The CFP is open across all tracks. Share what you've learned.

CFP closes January 30, 2026. Submit here. 

Welcome to January. The inbox is overflowing. Q1 goals just dropped. Everyone's talking about resolutions. Here's one worth keeping: Take care of yourself this year.

Not the vague "self-care" that means eye masks and bubble baths (though those are fine). Real, sustainable wellness. The kind that keeps you energized and passionate.

Let's be honest. Tech is hard on people.

Burnout is real. The always-on culture. The 2 AM pages. The pressure to constantly learn, constantly ship, and constantly perform. It catches up with everyone eventually.

Work-life balance is a myth. We've been chasing a fantasy. Integration is more realistic: finding ways to make work and life coexist without one consuming the other.

The Professional Development & Wellness Track at Postgres Conference: 2026

The Professional Development & Wellness track at Postgres Conference 2026 tackles the human side of technical careers. Learn from practitioners who've navigated these challenges and come out stronger.

Topics include:

• Managing and recovering from burnout
• Career advancement strategies
• Leadership development
• Communication skills for technical professionals
• Mental health in tech
• Work-life integration (not balance—integration)
• Building resilience
• Mentorship and sponsors
• Navigating career transitions
• Finding meaning in your work

These aren’t soft skills - these are survival skills. The technical skills that get you hired and motivate you. The human skills keep you going.

Postgres Conference 2025 Professional Development Track Highlights

Listen or watch sessions from the Postgres Conference 2025: Professional Development Track on YouTube.

Register for Postgres Conference: 2026

Postgres Conference: 2026 takes place April 21-23 in San Jose, California. The theme is Energizing People with Data and Creativity, and nothing needs more energy than the people doing the work.

Early bird registration is available now! Purchase your General Admission tickets here.

Call for Postgres Conference 2026 Speakers & Trainers

If you've navigated career challenges and can share lessons from your professional journey, we want to hear from you. The CFP is open across all tracks. Share what you've learned.

CFP closes January 30, 2026: Submit here.

In the spirit of fun and creativity, we’re kicking off 2026 with an invitation to bring your whole self to the Postgres community. Happy New Year from the Postgres Conference team. 

January may be wrapping up, but New Year's resolutions are still top of mind. Gym memberships. Dry January. Finally learning that language.

Here’s one resolution we can get behind: let the fun and creative parts of you take the mic.

The Life & Fun track at Postgres Conference 2026 has nothing to do with PostgreSQL, and that's exactly the point.

We spend so much of our lives thinking about databases, deployments, and deadlines. But who are you when you close the laptop? What lights you up when you're not troubleshooting queries?

Maybe you're a beekeeper. You understand colony management, seasonal cycles, and the delicate art of not getting stung.

Maybe you went solar. You researched panels, navigated permits, and now you watch your energy meter spin backward.

Maybe you're building a homestead. Chickens, gardens, rainwater collection. You're learning skills your grandparents knew and your coworkers don't.

Maybe you restore classic cars. Carburetors, body work, and the satisfaction of an engine turning over after months of weekends in the garage.

Maybe you build terrariums. Tiny ecosystems in glass. Living art that requires patience and precision.

Things like this are what make you a whole person. And whole people make better colleagues, better problem-solvers, and better community members.

Topics in the Life & Fun Track

• Hobbies and passion projects
• DIY and maker culture
• Outdoor adventures
• Creative pursuits
• Sustainability and self-sufficiency
• Anything that brings joy

Register for Postgres Conference: 2026

Postgres Conference 2026 takes place April 21-23 in San Jose, California. 

The theme, Energizing People with Data and Creativity, recognizes that the most powerful systems are built by people who are curious, fulfilled, and energized beyond their day jobs. The Life & Fun track celebrates that truth by making space for the passions, projects, and pursuits that recharge us and shape how we show up for our communities and our work.

Early bird registration is available now! Purchase your General Admission tickets here. 

Call for Postgres Conference 2026 Speakers & Trainers

We’re also welcoming proposals across all tracks, including Life & Fun. The Call for Speakers and Trainers is an invitation to bring your whole self to the conference stage. Share what excites you, what you’ve built, or what you’ve learned outside the database.

CFP closes January 30, 2026. Submit here. 

PostgreSQL is more than a database. It's the foundation developers build on.

Every application has a data layer. The decisions you make there—schema design, query patterns, extension choices, performance trade-offs—shape everything that comes after.

What You'll Learn in the Dev Track

 The Dev track at Postgres Conference 2026 is where developers share what they've learned building real applications with PostgreSQL.

This isn't theory. This is practice.

Real architectural decisions. When to denormalize. How to handle multi-tenancy. Whether to push logic into the database or keep it in the application layer. Hear how experienced developers made these choices and what they learned.

Modern stack integrations. GraphQL APIs. Event-driven architectures. Microservices. Serverless functions. PostgreSQL fits into all of them, and you'll learn the patterns that actually work.

Extensions in production. pg_vector for semantic search and AI applications. PostGIS for location features. Full-text search that scales. Custom data types that model your domain perfectly. Learn from teams using these in real applications.

Performance that matters. Query optimization from the developer's perspective. Schema designs that perform at scale. Lessons learned when users actually showed up..

Topics in the Dev Track

• Application architecture patterns with PostgreSQL
• Schema design and data modeling
• Query optimization for developers
• ORMs, query builders, and database access patterns
• Building APIs backed by PostgreSQL
• Testing strategies for database-backed applications
• Lessons learned from production applications

Postgres Conference 2025 Highlights

Check out how presenters tackled PostgreSQL topics and get a preview of what to expect in 2026. Listen and watch highlights in our Postgres Conference 2025 YouTube playlist.

Register for Postgres Conference: 2026

Postgres Conference 2026 takes place April 21-23 in San Jose, California. The theme is Energizing People with Data and Creativity, and the Dev track is where data meets the applications that innovate and make it useful.

Early bird registration is available now! Purchase your General Admission tickets here. 

Call for Postgres Conference 2026 Speakers & Trainers

If you like building applications with PostgreSQL and can help others learn from your development experience, why not share your experience? The CFP is open across all tracks. Share what you've learned.

CFP closes January 30, 2026. Submit here. 

As part of the countdown to Postgres Conference 2024, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

Manish Shah is founder and CEO of Datasparc, and brings expertise in product development, database security, and scalable cloud systems. His thought leadership and patent ownership in sensitive data discovery and protection underscore his ability to influence and innovate in the field.

Manish will present "Zero Trust database access with DBHawk". Read what Manish has to say about Postgres and why to attend his session:

Why should attendees come to your talk at Postgres Conference 2024? What would you like for them to take away from your session?

Join the session exploring critical database security and access challenges. Manish will dissect current issues and provide solutions for achieving precise zero-trust database access.

What is your favorite aspect of Postgres Conference?
Meeting face-to-face Postgres users.

What advice would you have for a Computer Science graduate or entry level developer who are interested in learning and engaging with Postgres and other open source technologies?
Learn SQL and other programming language. Install Postgres and start playing with it.

How do you see the use of open source technologies evolving over the next five years?
Businesses are recognizing the value of open source software, and its adoption in the enterprise is expected to grow.

What considerations should be taken for the adoption and use of Postgres and related open source technologies?
Strong security and reliable support are crucial for wider adoption of Postgres. After all, data is an organization's most valuable asset.

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2024. Learn more about our conference here and buy your tickets soon!

Pavan Deolasse is a PostgreSQL consultant for 2ndQuadrant, one of our Platinum Sponsors for PostgresConf US 2018. Learn more about Pavan in this Community Profile:

Pavan Deolasee is a contributor to the development of PostgreSQL and related technologies. He holds a Masters of Technology in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and has several publications to his credit.

Pavan was introduced to PostgreSQL in the year 2006 when he started working for a PostgreSQL company. Hacking PostgreSQL was a completely new experience, but by accepting help from the community -- especially Simon Riggs, his mentor -- he began working through the code and was soon working on a very important project (Heap-Only-Tuple aka HOT). It was a very complicated piece of work, yet one of the landmark features in PostgreSQL and to this day remains one of his most important contributions to the project. Pavan has since contributed several patches to PostgreSQL. 

HOT was committed to PostgreSQL in 2008 and Pavan has continued to stay fully engaged with the project. In 2009/2010, alongside other colleagues, Pavan started work on Postgres-XC, a distributed, shared-nothing, clustering solution based on PostgreSQL. He was involved in designing the high-level architecture of the solution, and later wrote many important pieces of the code such as the GTM, the GTM Proxy, the 2PC transaction controller at the coordinator, changes required to guarantee global consistency of the data, and many distributed planner and executor pieces.

When Postgres-XL, a fork of Postgres-XC, was released to the public in 2014, Pavan once again became involved with the project and has been leading the development of Postgres-XL ever since. 

Pavan joined 2ndQuadrant not long after in April 2015, and once again started working with long time colleagues and friends; he and 2ndQuadrant have continued to actively work on the development of Postgres-XL. The focus area of development has been stability and performance of the product while keeping the fork as close to open source PostgreSQL as possible. The most recent release (Postgres-XL 10) supports intra-datanode query parallelism, thus taking distributed query processing to the next level.

In 2013, Pavan and two of his colleagues started the India PostgreSQL User Group. They started conducting small meet-ups, in order to promote the technology in India and bring the local community together. These small gatherings have now expanded with a membership of over 600 members, and into a full scale conference: PGConf India, Asia's largest PostgreSQL conference with more than 250 people in attendance each day in 2018. 

As part of the 2ndQuadrant team of PostgreSQL developers, Pavan continues to work on many interesting new features. He is an active part of the production support team and also has the opportunity to investigate interesting customer problems, often leading to important and critical bug fixes to the open source project.

Pavan had this to say about his involvement with the project:

“I love PostgreSQL and the PostgreSQL community, so you will continue to see me around.”

<

As part of the countdown to Postgres Conference 2024 learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

NEXTGRES founder Jonah Harris is a developer with expertise in database internals, high-performance systems, and near-real-time machine learning optimizations. Recognized for contributions to Oracle Database and PostgreSQL, with leadership roles at MariaDB, The Meet Group, and EnterpriseDB.

Jonah Harris will present The Future of MySQL is Postgres.  Read what Jonah has to say about Postgres and why to attend their session:

Why should attendees come to your talk at Postgres Conference 2024?  What would you like for them to take away from your session?

Attendees will leave this session understanding how PostgreSQL offers superior performance, reliability, and a richer set of features for modern application development over MySQL, and how this extension simplifies and accelerates the migration process, ensuring transparent compatibility. 

What is your favorite aspect of Postgres Conference?

My favorite aspect of Postgres conferences is the collaborative spirit, where developers, administrators, and enthusiasts come together to share their knowledge and solve real-world challenges.

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

I advise diving into hands-on projects and contributing to the OSS communities with an open mind; this offers invaluable experience and broad networking opportunities within open source communities, specifically PostgreSQL.

How do you see the use of open source technologies evolving over the next five years?

I see open source technologies becoming even more integral to innovation, driving collaboration and accessibility in emerging fields as well as traditional industries.

What considerations should be taken for the adoption and use of Postgres and related open source technologies? 

I always consider matching a technology's strengths to a project's needs. Whether it's Postgres or another OSS technology, evaluate it for its full capabilities and best fit first. Once those capabilities and fit are evaluated, assess the organization's ability to manage it.

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2024. Learn more about our conference here and buy your tickets soon!

As part of the countdown to Postgres Conference 2024, learn more about the engaging content and our speakers for this year in our Speaker Spotlight Series.

Shayon Sanyal is a Principal PostgreSQL Specialist at Amazon Aurora, with over 15 years experience, and crafts resilient applications, leveraging PostgreSQL's advanced features.

Shayon will present Enhancing OLTP Systems with pgvector: Best Practices in Database Design. Read what Shayon has to say about Postgres and why to attend their session:

Why should attendees come to your talk at Postgres Conference 2024? What would you like for them to take away from your session?
The integration of pgvector into existing Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems represents a significant advancement in leveraging vector search capabilities within traditional database environments. This presentation is designed to educate database professionals on the thoughtful integration of pgvector into OLTP applications powered by PostgreSQL, ensuring enhanced functionalities without compromising the core transactional integrity and performance. Attendees will learn how to adopt pgvector to unlock new application features while maintaining reliability, performance and scalability of their PostgreSQL databases. The presentation provides a roadmap for practical pgvector integration regardless of the hosting environment.

What is your favorite aspect of Postgres Conference?
For me, the most amazing aspect of the Postgres Conference is the opportunity to learn from and engage with some of the most brilliant minds in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. The lineup of speakers and contributors is always exceptional, offering invaluable insights and perspectives that can shape the future of this powerful database management system. The depth and breadth of technical discussions from advanced database internals and performance optimizations to cutting-edge features and real-world use cases, the conference provides a platform for exploring the full potential of PostgreSQL. It's a true feast for those who crave technical excellence.

What advice would you have for a Computer Science graduate or entry level developer who are interested in learning and engaging with Postgres and other open source technologies?
My advice would be to dive in headfirst and immerse yourself in the open source community. Start by exploring the official documentation and resources provided by the PostgreSQL project. Don't be afraid to ask questions on forums, mailing lists, or community channels – you'll be amazed at how welcoming and supportive the community is, especially towards those eager to learn. Attend local meetups or online events focused on PostgreSQL and open source technologies. These are excellent platforms for networking, learning from experienced professionals, and staying up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices.

How do you see the use of open source technologies evolving over the next five years?
Increased adoption across industries: Open source technologies have already gained widespread acceptance in the tech industry, but I expect their adoption to accelerate across various other sectors, such as finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and government. As organizations recognize the benefits of open source, including cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and community-driven innovation, they will be more inclined to embrace these technologies in their mission-critical systems.
What considerations should be taken for the adoption and use of Postgres and related open source technologies?
If I had to pick 2 then - 1/ Community Support and Documentation: Evaluate the size and activity level of the community surrounding the open source project. A vibrant and engaged community is often a good indicator of the project's long-term sustainability and the availability of support resources, such as documentation, forums, and mailing lists. and 2/ Scalability and Performance: Thoroughly assess the scalability and performance capabilities of the open source technologies you intend to use, especially if you anticipate handling large volumes of data or high-traffic workloads. Conduct performance testing and benchmarking to ensure that the technologies meet your specific requirements. Then there are other considerations such as security and compliance, integration and interoperability etc.

Check out the full schedule for PostgresConf US 2024. Learn more about our conference here and buy your tickets soon!

The Postgres Conference 2025 is set to take place in Orlando, Florida, from March 18 to 21, 2025. This year's conference features an expanded lineup of tracks, including the Dev Track, which is tailored for developers seeking to deepen their expertise in PostgreSQL. This track offers sessions to enhance your development skills, explore new tools, and provide practical insights into PostgreSQL's capabilities.

What to Expect

The Dev Track is curated to address the diverse needs of developers working with PostgreSQL. Attendees can look forward to:

• In-Depth Tutorials: Hands-on sessions that delve into advanced PostgreSQL features and development practices.
• Expert-Led Workshops: Opportunities to learn from seasoned professionals about optimizing performance, implementing machine learning, and more.
• Cutting-Edge Topics: Discussions on the latest tools, extensions, and methodologies in the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Session Highlights

Here are some standout sessions in the Dev Track:

• A Practical Guide to Set-Based Queries (paid training)

  • Speaker: Aaron Cutshall
  • Date & Time: March 18, 2025, 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM
  • Description: This workshop addresses performance issues arising from procedural code in PostgreSQL. Aaron will guide participants through transforming procedural logic into efficient set-based queries, enhancing database performance.
    
    

• Machine Learning using PostgreSQL (paid training)

  • Speaker: Abbas Butt
  • Date & Time: March 18, 2025, 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
  • Description: Abbas will introduce participants to implementing machine learning algorithms directly within PostgreSQL 15.x using Apache MADlib 2.1.0 installed on Ubuntu 22.04. The session covers practical applications of predictive analytics, enabling developers to harness the power of ML in their databases.
    
    
• From MongoDB to Postgres: Building an Open Source Standard for Document Databases
  
  • Speaker: Peter Farkas
  • Date & Time: March 19, 2025, 4:00 - 4:20 PM
  • Description: This session reviews the current state of document databases, and demonstrates how Postgres handles MongoDB workloads with ease.

For a comprehensive view of all sessions and to plan your itinerary, visit the official conference schedule.

Why Attend?

Participating in the Dev Track at Postgres Conference 2025 offers numerous benefits:

• Skill Enhancement: Gain practical knowledge and hands-on experience with PostgreSQL's advanced features.
• Networking Opportunities: Connect with fellow developers, industry experts, and thought leaders.
• Stay Current: Keep abreast of the latest developments, tools, and best practices in the PostgreSQL community.

Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your PostgreSQL development skills. Register now and join us in Orlando for an enriching experience.