A Committer's Preview of PGConf.EU 2016 - Part 2

Today, I will continue with my preview of the exciting talks at the upcoming PGConf.EU conference. In Part 1, I discussed the talks that will happen on Wednesday. Today, I want to dive into the Thursday sessions.

Starting in early on Thursday morning,if you haven’t tracked all the fantastic progress we’ve made with PostgreSQL 9.6 then definitely go to Magnus Hagander’s talk on What's New in PostgreSQL 9.6.  If all of that is old news to you and you’re looking at PG10 with the other developers, then the talk to be at is Anastasia Lubennikova and Konstantin’s on Page Level Compression and Encryption in Postgres, which is an absolutely amazing and fantastic direction for PostgreSQL to be going in and I’m quite excited about it.

Following that, be sure to come to my talk on Understanding PostgreSQL Query Plans. ;)

After the morning coffee break Giuseppe Broccolo and Julien Rouhaud will be talking about Extend BRIN Support to PostGIS: Block Range INdexing on Geospatial Data, which looks like a fantastic capability and an excellent way to have very small but extremely fast indexes on geospatial data.  This is high on my list of talks to check out as we discover more and more cases where we must answer queries based on both time ranges and spatial areas at the same time very quickly.  Following that is a very interesting talk by Dennis Butterstein known as Firing the Interpreter. A Case Study of LLVM-based Expression Compilation - Just in Time, which looks like a very interesting way to compile your queries down to a lower level for execution instead of the current approach which works with Executor nodes to implement the query.  Another deep internals talk but one which shows a great deal of promise for almost free order-of-magnitude performance improvements in PostgreSQL.

After lunch, I’ll have to go to Simon Rigg’s HOT & Other UPDATE Optimizations as the mailing lists have been all buzzing about WARM and true secondary indexes and this looks like a very interesting opportunity to extend PostgreSQL in directions we have not reached out to yet.  If internals are not your thing, then both of the other talks look great- Securing PostgreSQL is key for every DBA to understand how to do, and if you feel comfortable there, then a nice break would be to check out the Billion Rows Pet Project.

Lastly on Thursday, I would have to recommend Cédric Villemain’s talk on Transactions Across Multiple Datastores.  Perhaps you don’t need to deal with that today (though I find that unlikely), but you’ll definitely have to deal with that in the future and it is extremely important to understand the techniques and best practices for scaling across multiple datastores.

Also, don’t miss the Lightning Talks - Harald does a fantastic job with them and it is a ton of fun.

Check back tomorrow for my Part 3 of the PGConf.EU preview in which I discuss Friday's sessions!