PGCon 2018: photos, slides, impressions



    Last week, from May 29 to June 1, PGCon 2018 conference was held . PGCon takes place in Ottawa every year. Unlike other PostgreSQL conferences, PGCon is positioned as a conference not of users, but of developers . This makes it an extremely important event in the life of the project. Next, I would like to share my impressions of the conference and talk about the moments that I remember the most.

    Four people from our company attended the conference: Alexander Korotkov , Fyodor Sigaev , Anastasia Lubennikova, and your obedient servant, Alexander Alekseev . We all made presentations, some even with several.

    Alexander Korotkov gave a talk at Credereum - blockchain-enabled Postgres . Alexander also took an active part in the Unconference.. What is Unconference? Within one day, developers communicate on any topics that they consider important and for which other developers will vote. With the help of markers, large yellow stickers and raising hands, a schedule is drawn up, then the developers go to meetings devoted to topics of interest.


    Alexander Korotkov (closest to the board) and Robert Haas (on his right hand) are discussing with the audience how to add a storyboard to PostgreSQL.

    In total, Alexander participated in the maintenance of two sections at the Unconference - “Scale Out & Global snapshots” and “Plugable Table Access Methods”. Adding global snapshots to PostgreSQL allows you to perform distributed transactions between multiple DBMS instances while maintaining the ACID properties, which is currently not easy. As for the plug-in storage, with their help it will be possible to implement column storage, in-memory tables, index organized tables and other interesting features. Both global snapshots and plug-ins are stored at the time of this writing.

    Fedora’s report was called Jsonb flexible indexing . Fedor also had the honor of being invited to a closed Developer Meeting. Despite the closeness of this meeting, itoutlined on the project wiki . From the abstract, we can learn that, within the Developer Meeting, the PostgreSQL 12 commitments schedule was discussed, how to make patches less transferred from one commitfeed to another, how the project affects the project, and other issues.


    Developer Meeting participants. Fedor stands in the center in the first row, in a yellow T-shirt.

    Anastasia and I gave a presentation on Growing up new PostgreSQL developers . This report is absolutely not technical. He talks about how we were looking for new developers to our company, taught courses at the VMK and at HSE, how we gathered all the rake of beginning project managers, and similar issues. I posted the report slides in my English-language blog for PostgreSQL Planet..

    Anastasia also had a second report, Towards scalable ACID PostgreSQL with partitioning, postgres_fdw and logical replication . This report was originally submitted by our colleague, Arseny Sher. Unfortunately, Arseny was unable to attend the conference this time, and Anastasia told about the report. From the report you will learn about how our sharding and master-master replication implementations, which are part of PostgresPro Enterprise, work and in what direction.

    At the closing ceremony of the conference, a pleasant surprise awaited us. Alexander Korotkov was among the few people who were decided to grant the rights of a committer. In addition to Alexander, committers have becomeEtsuro Fujita, Peter Geoghegan, Amit Kapila, Thomas Munro, Michael Paquier and Tomas Vondra. In total, there are now two committers in Russia - Alexander and Fedor, both working in PostgresPro.

    This is with regard to the most memorable events for me and the contribution of our company directly to the conference. Unfortunately, in one post it is not possible to tell in detail about everything that happened at the conference, and also so that it does not turn into a boring longrid. Therefore, at this moment I, perhaps, will begin to curtail my story. (In general, we all understand that reports are only an excuse to get together, and all the most interesting things happened on the sidelines and at social events.)

    PGCon is a top-notch conference, and I recommend that you visit it next year, you will not regret it. Where else in one place are there so many talented people (who you can talk with not only for Postgres, but about anything from electronics to Clojure programming) and you can watch the work of such a unique open source community like the PostgreSQL community?

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