Continuing my review of the upcoming program for PG DATA 2026, started here.
I will start with Umair’s talk, Securing Multi‑Tenant Databases with Row‑Level Security & Open‑Source Auditing. I always await Umair’s talks with great anticipation because his vision of Postgres is closely aligned with mine, and the topics he discusses are usually the ones I am most interested in. This talk interests me a lot, because the topic of multi-tenancy is the one of my favorite, but Umair’s approach is absolutely the opposite of the path I take, and I wish I had time to discuss and ask the questions afterward! Umair would have to come to Chicago one more time to present at Prairie PUG!
In parallel, Radim Marek will present Visualizing PostgreSQL Storage Internals. I met Radim at DevDays Prague earlier this year, when he talked about regression testing of SQL queries, and to be honest, I was sad that our CfP committee didn’t choose that talk, because it was brilliant. I am sure he will deliver an equally brilliant talk in Chicago (I love what I read in the talk description); it will just be a different one :).
What I really like about this year’s program is that we have many presentations about real-life experiences, about complicated projects that succeded, and lessons learned. On Thursday, we will have a number of such talks. including What I Learned Using PostgreSQL In Real Products by Hajira Sultana and Building and scaling Managed Postgres from 0 to 1000s by Sam Wilson.
Steve Zelasnik is a long-time active Prairie Postgres PUG member (and formerly Chicago PUG member), and he previously presented his work at PG Day Chicago. In his The Multi-Terabyte Trust Exercise: Validating Massive Postgres Migrations presentation, he will share yet another real-life experience and lessons learned. And I am sure, nobody would want to miss Graph-Like Analytics in PostgreSQL for Payer Behavior and Underpayment Detection by Nida Fatima – aren’t we all the victims of this system?!
If you ever participated in one of my optimization training sessions, you heard me repeating “Think like a database!” Sneha Patil’s talk is titled almost similarly, Think Like Postgres: Smart SQL Tips. Judging by the talk description, she will share many of the techniques I promote.
Next comes Schema-First PostgreSQL Migrations Without a DSL by Greg Potter. I have to confess, initially I didn’t look at the talk description, but when I looked, I realized that Greg was solving the same puzzle I was sloving several months ago! I also had fun time deconstructing pg_depend, so I would be happy to compare our notes!
Of course, these days, no conference is complete without AI-related talks, and we will have Gleb Otchkin speaking about Vector data in Postgres: Size, TOAST, Filters and Performance. Gleb, thank you for submitting, and I hope you will enjoy our conference!
Sami Imseih is also one of my favorite speakers, who used to be an active member of our PUG (and we miss him!). I hope that his talk Become a PG_STAT_* (Star) will be equally useful for both Postgres novices and experienced developers.
I already heard Pavlo’s presentation Professional PostgreSQL monitoring made easy, and I really liked the tool, and I hope that if mt co-workers attend, they might be interested!
Finally, I am very thankful to the CfP committee for allowing me to talk about pg_acm! No matter how I package my ideas, no one likes when I explain what’s wrong with Postgres permissions, so that will be my only chance in 2026!
That’s all for today, stay tuned for Part 3 of the preview!
The World of Data 