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Speaker Interview: Alicja Kucharczyk

From minutes to milliseconds – Tips and tricks for faster SQL queries   Friday 09:30   Baltic II+III

Twitter: @linuxpolska LinkedIn: alicja-kucharczyk LinkedIn: linuxpolska Facebook: linuxpolskapl Company website: linuxpolska.pl

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I’m a long-time developer, PostgreSQL administrator, PostgreSQL trainer and consultant with specific technical experience in the financial sector. Currently, as a solution architect at Linux Polska, I work mostly on enterprise applications, tuning and counseling about specific setup or architectural changes and evangelize PostgreSQL to Oracle people.

I’m a big fan of open source approach, hoping it will spread to other areas of life, including law making and the healthcare.

Have you enjoyed previous pgconf.eu conferences, either as attendee or as speaker?

I was in Dublin for the 2013 edition as an attendee and I enjoyed a lot both the sessions and the atmosphere.

What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

I'll show some real-life examples of PostgreSQL query optimizations.

(At the time) When I was at the conference in Dublin, I worked as a developer (which I'm not any more) without any previous DBA or sysadmin experience. I was a bit surprised by a small number of talks related to my current job and completely overwhelmed by the information strictly related to DBA- stuff, over which (as a developer) I had no influence or control anyway.

Since that time, I've written and rewritten many SQL queries in many different databases - keeping some of them as examples.

So, I've decided to present a talk, which would be a perfect fit for me from that time and for everyone who's starting his or her adventure with postgres or generally query tuning.

What is the audience for your talk?

Everyone interested in query tuning or curious about how it is done in PostgreSQL. Developers trying to write optimal queries, as well as DBA's wondering what could be done better beyond configuration tuning.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

Basic SQL skills.

What's the most missing feature in PostgreSQL?

Many of my customers, after their databases reach substantial sizes, they encounter issues with partitioning. I don't even mean the necessity of writing custom triggers (I'm looking forward to PostgreSQL 10 declarative partitioning), but lack of a feature that allows them to create foreign key constraints to the partitioned table (both with declarative and trigger-based solutions). This issue prevents using the feature in the classic RDBMS, where those constraints are crucial.