Could you briefly introduce yourself?

Hi, I'm Peter. I built the first cloud relational database service because we started Heroku, a cloud application platform, before Amazon RDS existed. During my time at Heroku we ran into every imaginable Postgres operational and scaling challenge and I became a part of the community through attending Postgres conferences as part of my work. Today I am part of a small and unrelated industrial research lab but I still like to find ways to participate in the community.

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

My first PGConf.eu was in Amsterdam and I've always enjoyed coming to Europe to share my experiences with the community here. I come every year I can, but it's a long way from San Francisco!

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

I gave a talk some years ago which described Postgres as being 25 years old, and a stranger sent me an email to say I was wrong, dead wrong, and that I should look further into the history. That man was a participant in the original Berkeley University research project that created Postgres and piqued my interest. When I finally had a bit more time to invest in learning the history I discovered there were all kinds of great stories from Postgres' early history and that a lot of those stories were not widely known... so I wrote this talk!

What is the audience for your talk?

Anyone with an interest in where their tools come from, or the history behind them can enjoy this talk.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

My talk should be accessible to everyone!