Malcolm McLean

Senior Software Engineer at Evermed

About

Malcolm is currently based in Sydney, Australia and has worked with PostgreSQL for over 20 years. He is a Senior Engineer at Evermed and previously ran a PostgreSQL and software development consultancy in Johannesburg, South Africa. Prior to that he has also worked as a software engineer, PostgreSQL DBA and Linux system administrator. Using, working with and advocating for Open Source software has been at the core of his career.

Outside of his professional career, Malcolm has also been an organiser of PostgreSQL conferences in South Africa, the United States and Australia. He also plays various musical instruments, is a tinkerer and pedantic perfectionist.

Malcolm McLean has presented the following presentations

    Malcolm McLean From smallint to bigint and char to varchar, it's time to demystify the data types at PG Down Under 2025
    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

    Fri 17 2025 Essentials