Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Ilya Kosmodemiansky and I am a Co-founder and a CEO of Data Egret. A firm specializing in PostgreSQL maintenance, consulting and 24/7 database administration support. I have been working with Postgres for over a decade.

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

I took part in the PGconf.EU as a speaker and attendee and always found it extremely interesting and empowering. The European Postgres community is very welcoming and with every conference I can see how it continues to grow, share knowledge and encourage collaboration to indeed build the most advanced open source database.

In addition, keeping in mind that this conference is organised solely by volunteers and is run as a non-profit event it is amazing to see what can be achieved.

Why do you find it’s important to continue with pgconf.eu tradition?

In Europe many enterprises and organizations use Postgres, however, the market, compared to the US for example, still looks not as mature. I therefore find that it is more important than ever to keep the momentum going and strengthen European Postgres community by holding such events.

They allow experts, database evangelists and those new to Postgres across Europe to get together, exchange ideas, collaborate and strengthen Postgres network.

Alternating between different cities in Europe as conference location is a great feature of this conference too as it allows for across the border collaborations to be established.

What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic? What is the audience for your talk?

I have two sessions during the PGconf.EU. One is a training session that I will be leading alongside Victor Egorov from 9:00-17:00 on Tuesday, 24 October: PostgreSQL query optimisation techniques, step by step.

Everyone knows that queries need to be optimised but many struggle with understanding and interpreting EXPLAIN ANALYZE output. This tutorial provides a very systematic overview of the whole process from simplest indexing techniques to serious hacking of the confused optimiser.

Why this topic: Query optimisation, in our opinion, is one of the key tasks in working of every DBA and DBA engineer it’s in general important for anyone who works with databases.

Audience: The session would be great for those who work with Postgres on daily basis as well as those who have had a break from routine Postgres work and would like to freshen up their query optimisation skills.

Second session that I run is An ultimate guide to upgrading your PostgreSQL installation 9:30-10:20, on 26 October.

Audience and why this topic: I think it’s a perfect topic for DBAs and DevOps attending this autumn conference as this is usually the time of the major release and this year we are welcoming Postgres 10. A major upgrade theoretically is a very straight forward process but there are many troublesome details that one must be wary of. At the same time it can become risky as it might result in the lost of your data and screwing up all your database installation. I compiled all these important details in one talk and hope it will provide attendees the necessary tools and confidence to be able to perform an upgrade smoothly.

What new features of Postgres 10 you find extremely helpful and on what features you think the community should focus on for the next major upgrade?

Postgres 10 is full of new and exciting features, I personally find amazing how parallel queries were improved and not the least because this long story started several releases ago and it is extremely difficult for an open source product to develop such a complex features for several releases.

Another cool feature is declarative table partitioning that has been introduced in this release and I see this as only the first step and hope such complex functionality will continue to evolve and grow through next releases.

Having DBA background, I personally, would be happy if we would have additional monitoring and performance functionality introduced in future releases. Knowing DBAs though, there is never enough monitoring features one could have.