Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I'm a freelancer data scientist living in Vienna, Austria. After some development and administration work I decided to move to business intelligence first and than to analytics and data science. The tools I've been working with were always changing, with one exception: PostgreSQL was always there. Nowadays I'm doing consulting on PostgreSQL, data mining, data integration and similar topics with customers in 3 countries. In addition I'm a co-founder of Vienna's first scooter sharing SCO2T.

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

I was a speaker (with the talk "Data Science with PostgreSQL") at pgconf.eu 2015 in my home city Vienna. It was a great experience, both the reactions to my talk and all the other interesting talks.

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

The talk will be about a large migration from IBM DB2 on the mainframe to PostgreSQL. My colleague Michael Banck built the system for the migration in the beginning, he will explain that. I was the one performing the actual migration and supporting the developers before and after the migration. We learned a lot about the differences between the two relational database systems and the infrastructure like JDBC drivers, other frontends and so on. I'd like to share this knowledge with the PostgreSQL community.

What is the audience for your talk?

I think there will be some interesting content for DBAs, people who'd like to migrate from another database (not only DB2), and people using JDBC to access PostgreSQL.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

It helps if the attendee is familiar with standard database concepts and possibly with database development.

Which advanced features of PostgreSQL are you using that help you with your tasks?

I like mysql_fdw to transparently access MySQL databases in quite a few environments. JSONB is a great addition for easily storing optional and unstructured data. This allows me to create triggers that act on JSON input and update both PostgreSQL and MySQL at the same time. It's hard to think of any other system that would allow me to do this.