James Sadler

Principal Engineer at CipherStash Pty Ltd

About

James Sadler is a Principal Engineer at CipherStash, where he works on EQL, a PostgreSQL extension for searchable encryption. His work spans PostgreSQL internals, Rust systems programming, and applied cryptography, including a high-performance PostgreSQL-flavoured SQL parser validated against Postgres's own regression suite. He's based in Sydney and gets a kick out of building software that is correct by construction.

James Sadler has presented the following presentations

    James Sadler Reparsing Postgres at PG Down Under 2026
    A Fast SQL Parser Validated Against Postgres's Own Test Suite

    presented by James Sadler

    Almost every tool that touches SQL but isn't Postgres — linters, migration tools, query rewriters, proxies, ORMs, observability pipelines — has to understand the language without a running backend. And almost all of them get Postgres's dialect subtly wrong, because Postgres has one of the most intricate grammars in production software: a multi-thousand-line Bison grammar fused to a lexer that...

    more

    Fri 30 2026 Development