This year, the Lightning Talks at PGConf.EU were handled a bit different, compared to the previous years.
If you attended a previous PGConf.EU, you remember a whiteboard which at some point appears near the registration desk and people rush to fill in 12 talks. First come, first selected.
This year, Karen Jex suggested to have a box and everyone can drop in cards with a talk, and then 12 talks are randomly selected. In addition, the cards are color-coded, for new and experienced speakers. Lightning Talks were selected half/half, giving new speakers a chance for a short presentation. Although I heard that at least one person missed the deadline, I only heard good things about this model.
Like previous years, Dave Page moderated the show. Let’s dive in.
Christoph Berg: Bits and News from the PostgreSQL Contributors Team
Christoph Berg from Cybertec presented an overview how the contributors on the project website are selected.
Di Qi: A Simple Version of BM25 in Postgres
Di Qi from Lantern explains a number of BM25 implementations in only SQL, iteratively improving the performance of the algorithm.
Mark Wong: PostgreSQL Performance Farm 5 Second Update
Mark Wong from EnterpriseDB gave a very quick update of the PostgreSQL Performance Farm, which tests patches for performance regressions. He really aimed to deliver the shortest Lightning Talk this time.
Neeta Goel: Migration Consideration: Oracle to PostgreSQL
Neeta Goel from Newt Global explained the journey for a migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL.
Enes Cakir: Reduce your GitHub Actions bill by 10x
Enes Cakir from Ubicloud explains the simple change how companies can save a lot of money by switching the GitHub Actions container to the Ubicloud offering.
Jelte Fennema-Nio: pg_duckdb: Challenges and Benefits of Elephants with Beaks
Jelte Fennema-Nio from MotherDuck shows how the external DuckDB engine can run queries inside PostgreSQL.
Hannu Krosing: PgObject - a self-describing pg-typed structured data type (like JSON but Much Better)
Hannu Krosing from Google has an idea how to store “anything” in structured data types in JSON.
Raoul De Guchteneere: Migrating on new servers using repmgr with near zero downtime
Raoul De Guchteneere from the University of Louvain showed an example how a migration to new servers is possible with almost no downtime, by using repmgr.
Chris Ellis: So, You Want A … PGDay Website?
Chris Ellis from Nexteam signed up to improve the PGDay UK 2023 website - and then gradually migrated all the improvements over to more conference websites. Including the PGConf.EU 2024 website! The result looks very nice.
Do you have a conference which is in need of a website?
Marat Bogatyrev: From Backup to Integrity. Leveraging WAL-G for PostgreSQL
Marat Bogatyrev from data egret explains how WAL-G is used to verify integrity of backups. No one wants to loose a database, but surely no one also wants to find out that the backup is damaged!
I think Marat is the only speaker who ran out of time. Please use the slides to see the rest of the presentation, which is not in the recording.
Floor & Ads: Every Postgres contribution counts
Floor Drees from Tembo presented the PostgreSQL Contributions website which aims to list smaller contributions by individuals in the community. If you spot a contribution, please send an email.
Andreas Scherbaum then presented the PostgreSQL Event Calendar. You can add the calendar to your own calendar and will never again miss any Conference, Meetup, Online Event or Call for Papers. For missing events, please also send an email.
Eren Basak: Managing PostgreSQL on Cloud
Eren Basak from Ubicloud lists the challenges for running a PostgreSQL database in the cloud, and also lists some tips and tricks how to improve the situation.
Claire Giordano: My Journey to PostgreSQL & the PGCA Board of Directors
The last speaker is Claire Giordano from Microsoft. She talks how she became a board members for the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada, the entity which manages the PostgreSQL trademarks and domain names.
Summary
As usual, the Lightning Talks are now the last session of the conference. It’s a very fun event, which gives many speakers the opportunity to quickly introduce a new idea or a product to the audience. It is also a chance to present a summary talk, if a regular talk did not get accepted.
The Lightning Talk session was only followed by the Closing Session.
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