PG Down Under 2025 Program

2025-10-17
08:00
PGDU Committee Registration

presented by PGDU Committee

08:00 - 09:00 1st floor landing Conference happenings
09:00
Thomas Munro Half a dozen exciting new features in PostgreSQL 16, 17 and 18
A look at a selection of new features of interest to developers, DBAs and those curious about database internals

presented by Thomas Munro

This is a three part talk. The first part gives a very high level overview of the areas of development in recent major releases, including planning, execution, partitioning, replication, backups, monitoring, security, I/O, ongoing modernisation work and more.

In the second part, we'll look more closely at three selected new features that bring everyday benefits in terms of usability and mai...

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09:00 - 09:40 Oxford 1 + 2 Essentials
09:50
Nishchay Kothari PostgreSQL pgroll – Zero-Downtime, Reversible Schema Migrations

presented by Nishchay Kothari

Schema migrations in modern applications are often fraught with challenges, including downtime, client application disruption, and complexity in handling breaking changes. PostgreSQL pgroll addresses these issues by providing an innovative solution for zero-downtime, reversible schema migrations.

pgroll is an open-source command-line tool designed for PostgreSQL, ensuring that schema updates...

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09:50 - 10:30 Taylor Ops and Administration
Ravi Kiran Venkata Bhaskarabhatta PostgreSQL 18: The Ideal Foundation for Distributed, Scalable, and Analytical Applications

presented by Ravi Kiran Venkata Bhaskarabhatta

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 ul...

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09:50 - 10:30 Oxford 1 + 2 Essentials
10:30
PGDU Committee Morning tea

presented by PGDU Committee

10:30 - 10:50 Crown Conference happenings
10:50
Alena Rybakina Pull-up Optimization in the Postgres Planner

presented by Alena Rybakina

Pull-up is an optimization that already exists in PostgreSQL’s planner. It rewrites eligible subqueries into the main query level so that the planner can work with a unified join tree rather than treating subqueries as independent nodes.

Currently, PostgreSQL applies pull-up to several common subquery forms, including: - IN subqueries - EXISTS subqueries - ANY expressions (where applicabl...

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10:50 - 11:30 Taylor Development
Arul Arulappan Emma Fitzgerald Building SaaS scale Data store using PostgreSQL
How to build and run a large PostgreSQL fleet with millions of databases.

presented by Arul Arulappan and Emma Fitzgerald

Atlassian runs one of the largest Postgres fleets in the world with millions of databases. In this talk we will present how we have built and manage this scale, and the steps we are taking to build the next generation of this critical infrastructure that underpins our cloud version of Jira and Confluence. We will cover: - Criticality of Postgres for Atlassian. Most of Atlassian's products use...

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10:50 - 11:30 Oxford 1 + 2 Development
11:40
Peter Smith Tailoring CREATE PUBLICATION command for Targeted Data Replication

presented by Peter Smith

PostgreSQL's CREATE PUBLICATION command now does more than just copy tables. This presentation explores how modern PostgreSQL enables fine-grained control over exactly what data gets replicated.

We'll examine the command's evolution across PostgreSQL versions, showcasing capabilities including:

  • Selective table publishing - Choose exactly which tables to replicate
  • Row filtering - Repl...
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11:40 - 12:20 Oxford 1 + 2 Essentials
Rajesh Kandasamy Evolution of PostgreSQL Job Schedulers — pgAgent, pg_cron, and pg_timetable
From Cron Jobs to Chains: Automating PostgreSQL the Smart Way

presented by Rajesh Kandasamy

The landscape of job scheduling within PostgreSQL has undergone a significant transformation, moving from external, administratively intensive tools to sophisticated, in-database automation engines. This evolution, marked by the progression from pgagent to pg_cron and pg_timetable, reflects a broader trend towards operational simplicity, enhanced flexibility, and tighter integration with the da...

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11:40 - 12:20 Taylor Ops and Administration
12:20
PGDU Committee Lunch

presented by PGDU Committee

12:20 - 13:20 Crown Conference happenings
13:20
Malcolm McLean From smallint to bigint and char to varchar, it's time to demystify the data types
With so many data types, which do you use and which should you avoid?

presented by Malcolm McLean

PostgreSQL has dozens of different data types. Some work better than others if different stations, but which do you choose for each situation? varchar or text? int or bigint? Do you ever use money?

This talk will run through each of the main data types to help understand when you should be using each of them

13:20 - 14:00 Oxford 1 + 2 Essentials
Tarun Chatterjee Scaling AI Frontiers: Building Production-Ready RAG Applications with PG Vector on PostgreSQL

presented by Tarun Chatterjee

The rise of Generative AI has made Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) a cornerstone for building intelligent, context-aware applications. While many solutions turn to specialized vector databases, this often introduces architectural complexity, data silos, and new operational overhead. What if you could build highly scalable, enterprise-grade RAG applications using the trusted, powerful, and ...

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13:20 - 14:00 Taylor Development
14:10
Arpitha Vasudeva Demystifying PostgreSQL High Availability in the Cloud
Architecting Resilient Solutions for AWS Deployments

presented by Arpitha Vasudeva

High availability for PostgreSQL takes on new dimensions in cloud environments. This session breaks down the key architectural decisions teams face when designing for PostgreSQL high availability in the cloud. We'll explore read replicas, failover mechanisms, and backup strategies, comparing native PostgreSQL capabilities with cloud-native features. Using practical examples, we'll examine how t...

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14:10 - 14:50 Taylor Ops and Administration
Mark Wong An Adventure with the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data model

presented by Mark Wong

This is a tale about one company's experience with a database schema design refactor to use the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data model on its members. I will describe the original data model and why there was a need to move to a new data model, which the EAV was chosen for. This decision was made without realizing that the EAV data model is considered an anti-pattern for relational data model...

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14:10 - 14:50 Oxford 1 + 2 Development
14:50
PGDU Committee Afternoon tea

presented by PGDU Committee

14:50 - 15:10 Crown Conference happenings
15:10
Vigneshwaran C PostgreSQL Internals Uncovered: Enhancing Logical Replication and Introducing Columnar Indexing
Technical insights into the design, challenges, and implementation of complex logical replication features and VCI

presented by Vigneshwaran C

This talk will dive into a series of recent contributions to PostgreSQL, made possible by a team working with sustained focus on core database infrastructure. Rather than offering high-level overviews, the session will explore the technical design and implementation details behind several complex features we’ve delivered. These include: Conflict Detection for Update-Deleted Tuples – enhancing...

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15:10 - 15:50 Oxford 1 + 2 Development
Lloyd Albin AutoVacuum - Tuning and Monitoring

presented by Lloyd Albin

I have been asked many times by other PostgreSQL DBA's about what could be causing queries to run progressively slower while their application is running but then runs fast again after the application is stopped and restarted a short time later or the database is reloaded from backup and now runs fast again. These can all be symptoms of AutoVacuum/AutoAnalyze/Index issues.

Some of the slow ...

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15:10 - 15:50 Taylor Ops and Administration
16:00
Sameer Kumar Roneel Kumar Overcoming Challenges in SQL Server to PostgreSQL Migrations: Mapping Backups, Collations, and Case Sensitivity

presented by Roneel Kumar and Sameer Kumar

SQL Server to PostgreSQL migrations present a complex array of technical differences that can challenge even experienced DBAs - we've seen this firsthand across hundreds of hours spent with customers managing databases from tens of GiBs to several terabytes. Successfully navigating these migrations requires deep understanding of how critical components like backups, collations, and case sensiti...

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16:00 - 16:40 Taylor Ops and Administration
Dylan Griffith Technical Deep Dive Into GitLab’s Database Load Balancer Architecture
Strategic decisions in the design of GitLab's sophisticated open source Rails load balancer

presented by Dylan Griffith

Problem: Idle Replicas

Many open source tools exist today for creating high availability deployments of Postgres. Most of these tools involve having 1 primary database and a fleet of replicas which have some small amount of replication lag. Almost all of these solutions mean running multiple Postgres servers with the same amount of disk space, CPU and memory in order to ensure that any re...

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16:00 - 16:40 Oxford 1 + 2 Development
16:40
PGDU Committee Panel discussion

presented by PGDU Committee

16:40 - 17:10 Oxford 1 + 2 Conference happenings
17:10
PGDU Committee Closing

presented by PGDU Committee

17:10 - 17:30 Oxford 1 + 2 Conference happenings
17:30
PGDU Committee AGM

presented by PGDU Committee

17:30 - 17:40 Oxford 1 + 2 Conference happenings
17:40
PGDU Committee Cocktail event

presented by PGDU Committee

17:40 - 18:40 The Surry Rooftop Conference happenings