The meetup was hosted under the PostgreSQL Down Under (PGDU) umbrella and reflected the strong collaboration and energy across the Australian Postgres community.
PostgreSQL Sydney Meetup wrap-up
What a fantastic evening at the first Sydney PostgreSQL Meetup at the Fujitsu offices in Sydney. It was great to see the local PostgreSQL community come together for an event that felt both welcoming and technically rich.
The meetup was hosted under the PostgreSQL Down Under (PGDU) umbrella and reflected the strong collaboration and energy across the Australian Postgres community.
A community kickoff across Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane
The evening began with a joint session connecting Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, which created a great sense of shared momentum before each city moved into its local agenda.
The Sydney event was hosted by Rajni Baliyan, and featured a relaxed mix of technical talks, practical insights, discussion, and networking. The Melbourne meetup, hosted by Anand Subramanian, and the Brisbane meetup, hosted by Gary Evans, also brought their communities together at the same time.
With three meetups happening at the same time, it truly became a nationwide celebration of the PostgreSQL community.
The talks and technical highlights
I had the chance to present Beyond Keyword Search: Semantic Retrieval in PostgreSQL with pgvector, where I shared how we can move beyond traditional keyword search toward more context-aware and intelligent retrieval approaches. The discussion explored how semantic retrieval can support use cases such as knowledge bases, smarter data systems, and AI-enabled applications.
For those who could not attend the Sydney session or for anyone interested in PostgreSQL and AI, I will be embedding the slides from my presentation here. This should make it easier to explore the concepts discussed and revisit key ideas around semantic search and pgvector.
The Sydney agenda also included a talk on PostgreSQL 18 new features, with a focus on performance enhancements, benchmarking, and the query planner, along with another session on lessons learned from real-world PostgreSQL usage. That mix made for a strong technical program that balanced practical experience with forward-looking ideas.
Highlights from Melbourne and Brisbane
It was great to see equally engaging agendas across the other cities.
In Melbourne, the meetup included a mix of community discussions and technical sessions focused on practical PostgreSQL use cases and emerging features, continuing the strong tradition of the Melbourne PostgreSQL User Group in fostering deep technical exchange.
Meanwhile in Brisbane, the session brought together local practitioners to share insights, experiences, and real-world applications of PostgreSQL, with a strong emphasis on community-driven learning and collaboration.
Together, these parallel meetups reinforced the depth and strength of the PostgreSQL ecosystem across Australia.
Networking, conversations, and food
One of the best parts of the evening was the networking. There were plenty of thoughtful conversations, idea sharing, and genuine enthusiasm for PostgreSQL across different roles and experience levels.
And of course, good food helped make the evening even more enjoyable.
Bringing the meetup to everyone
For those who couldn’t attend the meetup in person, I am sharing my presentation below, which dives into how modern AI techniques can be applied directly within PostgreSQL. I walk through practical approaches to semantic retrieval and intelligent data access, highlighting how PostgreSQL extensions can be used to support AI‑driven workloads without introducing unnecessary architectural complexity.
The presentation explores how concepts such as embeddings, vector similarity search, and AI‑assisted retrieval can be integrated into existing PostgreSQL environments, bridging traditional relational data with ML, LLM, and GenAI use cases.
Beyond keyword search:
Semantic retrieval in PostgreSQL with pgvector (Diksha Sharma)
Click to view the slides side by side
Top to bottomClick to view the slides in vertical orientation
Wrapping up
A big thank you to the organizers, speakers, attendees, and everyone who helped make the first Sydney PostgreSQL Meetup such a success. Special thanks to Fujitsu for supporting the community and hosting the event in their Sydney office.
I am looking forward to many more meetups and more great conversations ahead.
Photo gallery
PostgreSQL Insider 
