For the first PGDay organized in Belgium by the PgBE PostgreSQL Users Group Belgium, this event regrouped around 40 PostgreSQL fans on 17 May 2019 in Leuven. It was for me a really nice day and I’d like to share it with you.
This day was all about PostgreSQL and a big opportunity to meet with other people interested in PostgreSQL in Belgium. The event was suitable for everybody, from first-time users, students, to experts and from clerks to decision-makers.
With not less than 10 talks, 2 parallel tracks in the afternoon, the list of speakers was impressive, with a lot of international speakers too.
After having learned some good advices with Hans-Jürgen Schönig during his Fixing common performance problems talk, Ilya Kosmodemiansky told us how to screw it with some PostgreSQL Worst practices.
In the afternoon, I choose to stay in the main room. So, I could watch Thijs Lemmens showing a demo on how to perform Downtimeless PG upgrades using logical replication. Based on docker and docker-compose, he created 2 PostgreSQL clusters and installed pgAdmin 4 and HAProxy. If you wish to try the demo by yourself, Thijs released everything you need on his GitHub account.
Tomas Vondra explained us next what Create statistics is and when to use it. He also gave us a quick overview of what will be new in PostgreSQL 12 on this topic. It was really interesting to see examples based on Belgian cities.
Then… the pressure was on my shoulders to talk about Streaming Replication, the basics. The idea was to summarize for beginners what WALs are, how does the Streaming Replication works, give some advices and best practices.
Boriss Mejías re-explained afterwards, with his own way, Replication, where things just work but you don’t know how. Even if we had some overlap, the two talks were in fact pretty much complementary.
Unfortunately, I missed:
- Declarative Table Partitioning - What do I need it for? - Boriss Mejías
- Dynamically switch between datasources in code - Marco Huygen
- PostgreSQL Buffers - Vik Fearing
- Data Vault 2.0 & Pivotal Greenplum - Joren Oris
Hans-Jürgen Schönig finally showed some of the most common, most funny and most interest cases he had over the years. That was a really cool way to end the day.
The event was hosted by the University of Leuven. The place was awesome. Cozy, roomy and fully geared for the speakers. I really enjoyed being there.
A warm thank you to the organizers, speakers and attendees for making this event a reality!
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