This year Postgres open and PGConf SV have combined to great a bigger and better conference right in downtown San Francisco. I’m obviously biased as I’m one of the co-chairs, and I know every conference organizer says picking the talks was hard, but I’m especially excited for the line-up this year. The hard part for me is going to be which talks do I miss out on because I’m sitting in the other session that’s ongoing. You can see the full list of talk and tutorial sessions, but I thought it’d be fun to do a rundown of some of my favorites.

How Postgres could index itself

Postgres indexing itself has long been on my wishlist. Andrew Kane from Instacart, and creator of PgHero has bottled up many learnings into a new tool: Dexter. I suspect we’ll get a look at all that went into this, how it works, and how you can leverage it to have a more automatically tuned database.

Scaling a SaaS Application Beyond a Single Postgres with Citus

Migration talks are all to common, from Postgres to MySQL from MySQL to Postgres, or from Dynamo to Postgres. But this one is a little different flavor from Postgres to sharded Postgres with Citus. Sharding into a distributed system of course brings new things to consider and think about, and here you’ll learn about them from first hand experience so hopefully you can avoid mistakes yourself.

Concurrency Deep Dive

This one looks to be a great under the hood look as well as likely very practical. It’ll cover MVCC which is really at so much of the core of how Postgres works, but then bring it up to what it means for things like locks. Best of all, this one like so many others comes with lots of real world experience from Segment.

Postgres window magic

I love me some windows, though not always the easiest things to work with. They can let you easily do things like compute month over month growth between rows in a single query. Bruce whose always a great presenter walks us through them and all the things they’re capable of.

Running PostgreSQL @ Instagram

Instagram is well known as one of the largest apps in the world. They optimized and changed their setup multiple times and probably scaled in about every way possible. Here we get to learn about all the various things you need in running at a truly astonishing scale.

Many many more

Of course there’s many more. Talks range from looks at new features, to how certain companies are using Postgres. We’ve got companies like Instacart and Instagram as mentioned giving talks, to Postgres core committers. Whether you want to learn about the inner workings of Postgres (which often hurts my brain) to how you can simply speed up your app you should find something you like, as long as you like Postgres that is. Take a look at the full list of sessions and we hope to see you there.