Elephant in Oceanium: Insights from PGDay Lowlands 2025

Other Talks and Highlights

• Opening remarks – Boriss Mejias, as the organizer and guide, opened the conference by emphasizing the value of the community around PostgreSQL. Personally,
• Jimmy Angelakos – “How Do We Get Postgres to the Next Level?”
  This talk was inspired by the one given by Simon Riggs in December 2023 in Prague. Jimmy offered different insights to keep improving PostgreSQL by making it more modular, boosting test coverage, creating a team specialized only in performance issues, and adding some new cutting-edge features. In particular, he mentioned goals like 100% regression testing, online major-version upgrades, and optional multi-threading – all part of a roadmap to solidify PostgreSQL’s lead.
• Gulçin Yıldırım Jelinek – “Anatomy of Table-Level Locks in PostgreSQL”
  This was an intermediate deep dive into DDL locks: explaining Access Share, Exclusive, Access Exclusive locks, and how they queue during ALTER or DROP commands. She showed how to interpret lock waits and deadlocks, and shared practical tips (like using online schema-change tools) to achieve near-zero downtime during migrations.
• Chris Ellis – “Fun With UUIDs“
  I very much enjoyed this talk. UUIDs have a bad reputation, mostly because randomly allocated UUIDs negatively affect indexes. But UUIDs also give us 16 bytes of space to play with, which can be to our advantage. Chris showed how to use the space of UUIDs to structure and encode data within identifiers to distinguish tenants, shards, or partitions.
• Johannes Paul – “Actual trees, not b-trees – how I found PostgreSQL through PostGIS”
  Speaker charmed the auditorium with the story of a neighbor’s climate-monitoring project mapping real-life tree data across Germany. Because he needed efficient geographic searches, Johannes switched to using PostGIS on PostgreSQL for his web app.
• Dirk Krautschick – “Beyond Postgres – Insights about the PostgreSQL Extensibility”
  Dirk emphasized that Postgres is designed to be lightweight yet powerful via extensions. He explained the extension framework and sketched out how to write a new extension for extra functionality.
• Andreas Scherbaum – “What I learned interviewing the PostgreSQL Community”
  I enormously enjoyed this talk . Andreas has been running the postgresql.life interview series and distilled some fun stats from them. It was a charming “state of the community” talk with interesting charts and quotes.
• The final debate on “Autotuning in Postgres” was also very interesting. The PRO side (Luigi Nardi, Gianni Ciolli) argued that autotuning tools can save DBAs hours of manual work. But the CON side (Mayuresh S. Bagayatkar, Guy Gyles) countered that blindly auto-changing settings might over-tune and even hurt performance, since machines lack the human context for every deployment and current AI has no concept of truth.

Reflections