The annual PGCon in Canada, now in its 11th year, is one of the major events on the PostgreSQL calendar. This year’s conference, sponsored by Fujitsu, took place over four days at Ottawa University, as per the below schedule:
This year's venue: The Desmarais Building, University of Ottawa.| Day One | Developer Meeting |
| Day Two | Developer Unconference |
| Day Three | Talks - Day One |
| Day Four | Talks - Day Two |
The significance of this conference stems from its ability to attract most of the PostgreSQL core members, committers and major contributors from across the globe. This year was no exception.
I have attended two other PGCons in the past, however, this time I was honoured to be invited to take part in the Developer Meeting.
Developer Meeting
This meeting aimed to address some of the process issues and policies for the next version of PostgreSQL. The discussions were highly engaging and included prominent PostgreSQL contributors:
- Tom Lane (USA)
- Alvaro Herrera (Chile) and
- Heikki Linnakangas (Finland)
| The major decisions we reached were: | |
| 1Updating the list of PostgreSQL contributors in the PostgreSQL website | 2Giving credit to the reviewers who participated in the review process of the features committed into PostgreSQL 10. (This is important because reviewers spend the same amount of time reviewing the proposed feature patch). I hope this change encourages more people to review the upcoming feature patches to the next major version of PostgreSQL. |
Developer Unconference
This aspect of PGCon 2017, held on the second day, was devoted to discussing new-feature ideas for the PostgreSQL database. Community members, such as Robert Haas (US) and Andres Freund (US), actively worked on the best possible approach to delivering these features by weighing up all the pros and cons.
It was really good to be a part of this session, because I could see the exciting new features under development by the community. It was also a great opportunity to discuss pluggable storage, a feature for which I have great enthusiasm.
The Talks
More than 30 extremely engaging talks were scheduled over two days. The impressive line-up of presenters comprised PostgreSQL core members, committers and major contributors, as well as new community members, all highlighting a variety of problems, solutions and approaches. It was inspiring to attend so many amazing presentations and to see what the future holds for PostgreSQL.
These are just a few of the talks that really impressed me:
- JIT-Compiling SQL Queries in PostgreSQL Using LLVM
- Hash Joins: Past Present and Future
- Parallel Query V2
- Faster and Reliable Hash Index
- Towards Built-in Sharding in Community PostgreSQL
- Towards Comprehensive Testing tools
- SCRAM Authentication in PostgreSQL
- Partition and Conquer Large Data with PostgreSQL 10.
Haribabu Kommi (second from right) and Amit Kapita (third from left) with fellow attendees.
There are also plans to upload videos of all the talks to YouTube later this year.
One of the greatest benefits of PGCon is the opportunity it creates for attendees to meet so many PostgreSQL core members, committers and major contributors, who are doing such amazing work.
This year’s event in Ottawa was a huge success and I was very proud to be a part of it. You will be able to see the fruits of our labour in September when PostgreSQL 10 is due for release.
Be sure to contact us directly if you have any questions about PGCon, or how PostgreSQL can help your organization.
Downloadables
Full list of discussion notes from the Developer Meeting
Full list of proposed features from the Developer Unconference
Full list of talks and presentations
