POSETTE 2024
Last week, I attended and presented at POSETTE, An Event for Postgres. A selection of the presentations I found worthy of attention.
Good Talks
Comparing Postgres connection pooler support for prepared statements by Jelte Fennema-Nio. Jelte did a great job outlining the challenges he encountered adding protocol-level prepared query support to PgBouncer. So many edge cases! Very much a worthwhile effort, and an important contribution. In the Discord “hallway track”, Jelte said he has some ideas how to add support for LISTEN/NOTIFY, which also requires connection affinity. Alas, there’s no protocol-level support, so it’ll be tricky. I suspect I’ll eventually move the PGXN Bot to something like pgmq to avoid the issue.
How to work with other people by Jimmy Angelakos and Floor Drees. Jimmy & Floor capably highlighted issues of neurodiversity and mental health in the Postgres community and the workplace. I greatly appreciate the increasing awareness of and discussions about these issues, which for far to long have remained hidden or misunderstood. All too often they still are. The more people talk about them, the more they’ll be accepted and the better things will become. Love seeing this.
Even JSONB In Postgres Needs Schemas by Chris Ellis. Chris concisely
introduced the concept of JSON validation via check constraints to ensure
the integrity of data. He started with simple validation with json_typeof(),
moved to more comprehensive validation of various parts of a JSON or JSONB
object, and ultimately full JSON Schema validation with the pg_jsonschema
extension. Having recently written my own JSON Schema extension, I was happy
to see this topic receive more attention. The tool Chris developed to convert
JSON schema to a SQL function seems super neat, too — a great way to
bootstrap a check constraint from a JSON Schema where no such extension
exists, such as the big cloud providers.
I Also Spoke
I also gave a talk, State of the Postgres Extension Ecosystem, expanding upon my mini-Summit session. I think it came out pretty well, and hope it helps to get more people interested in extensions and solve the challenges for finding, evaluating, installing, and using them everywhere. Links:
Next Year
I found POSETTE a very nice Postgres conference. I applaud its commitment to a fully-virtual venue. In-person get-togethers are great, but not everyone can travel to them for reasons of cost, time, family, health, and more. Better still, the speakers recorded their presentations in advance, allows us to fully participate in discussion during our talks! (I mostly used my time to offer corrections and links to relevant resources.)
For those interested in Postgres, I heartily endorse this free, fully remote conference. Perhaps I’ll “see” you there next year.
Update 2024-06-24: Added link to PDF with notes.