PostgreSQL 18: The Ideal Foundation for Distributed, Scalable, and Analytical Applications
Presented by:
Ravi Kiran Venkata Bhaskarabhatta
I’m a Senior Specialist Consultant – Databases and AI at AWS, working with government, enterprise, and startup customers to design and scale highly resilient, mission-critical data platforms. With deep expertise in PostgreSQL, Oracle, and purpose-built NoSQL databases, I help organizations modernize legacy systems, drive down costs, and adopt cloud-native solutions that power innovation at scale.
I specialize in Amazon Aurora (including Aurora Limitless and DSQL), RDS, DynamoDB, Redis, Cassandra, and have architected globally distributed, ultra-low-latency systems for financial services, public sector, and healthcare industries. I've helped fintech customers build state-of-the-art disaster recovery (DR) architectures with Aurora Global and Limitless, improving P99 latencies by 35%, reducing DR RTO from 3 hours to under 2 minutes, and achieving zero-data-loss resilience with multi-region active-active setups.
With strong experience in big data and analytics platforms including Amazon EMR, S3, Glue, Kinesis, Athena, Delta Lakes, Apache Iceberg S3 Tables, Lake Formation Governed Tables, Spark and Hive I support customers in building secure, scalable data lakes that fuel GenAI and RAG-based agentic systems. I’ve enabled AI-driven applications for fraud detection, real-time risk modelling, and hyper-personalized experiences, reducing fraud losses by $6M/year and increasing e-commerce MRR by $1.8M.
I’m passionate about database optimization. I’ve helped clients:
Improve PostgreSQL write performance by 60% using HOT-friendly schema design
Reduce storage/vacuum overhead by 30% through better indexing and data modeling
Eliminate unnecessary writes to JSONB/BLOB fields and streamline event-driven pipelines
Offload 70% of read traffic to replicas, cutting Aurora costs by 25%
I’ve led petabyte-scale cloud migrations with zero downtime, orchestrated Oracle Exadata rollouts (X4–X9M) for major banks like Westpac.
🎯 Key Impacts:
$1.2M/year saved via Oracle-to-PostgreSQL modernization
22% increase in eCommerce cart conversion using GenAI
99.999% uptime for SaaS clients with multi-region replication
60% reduction in data pipeline costs using serverless and NoSQL
🎓 Certifications:
AWS Certified Database – Specialty AWS Certified AI Practitioner AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Microsoft Azure SQL DBA Oracle Certified Expert PMP | ITIL
No video of the event yet, sorry!
Modern day applications are increasingly expected to deliver flexibility and scalability to meet the demands of global users and unpredictable workloads. Organizations require databases that can dynamically grow beyond the boundaries of traditional CPU, memory, and storage often scaling horizontally. These applications are being redesigned to support distributed systems capable of delivering ultra low latency and predictable performance at any scale. Modern day applications are now being created without imposing strict referential integrity and foreign key dependencies at the database level often handling them at application layer however they still need transactional databases. On the other hand, relational databases - their foundational features such as joins, foreign key constraints and strict referential integrity impose significant overhead. ACID isolation levels, though essential for consistency are expensive to scale predictably, leading to performance bottlenecks and latency spikes. We have seen these challenges firsthand across hundreds of hours spent with customers managing databases from tens of GiBs to several terabytes. Based on our 500+ hours of experience consulting with those customers, we have also identified the key bottlenecks some of which coincidentally are also hindrance for migrating some of the critical OLTP applications from Oracle to PostgreSQL. In this talk, I shall share these bottlenecks and explain how the core gamechanging features of PostgreSQL 18 overcomes many of these challenges thus making it the ideal PostgreSQL version to build or migrate such highly scalable applications to.
Target Audience: DBAs and developers. Basic knowledge of PostgreSQL helpful but not required.
- Date:
- 2025 October 17 09:50 +11
- Duration:
- 40 min
- Room:
- Taylor
- Conference:
- PG Down Under 2025
- Language:
- Track:
- Essentials
- Difficulty:
- Easy