Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Robert Haas. I am have been a PostgreSQL developer since 2008 and a committer since 2009. Some of the features I’ve worked on during that time include parallel query, index-only scans, unlogged tables, and join removal. I work at EnterpriseDB as VP, Chief Database Architect.

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

Yes. I’ve only been to one, back in 2015, but it was a good conference. At that time I gave a a talk on "Planning Parallel and Distributed Queries" and a keynote on "The Elephants in the Room". The latter is a talk about some of the architectural limitations of PostgreSQL.

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

I’m very interested in partitioning right now because I believe that a good implementation of partitioning is critical to the future of PostgreSQL. There are many performance optimizations that can be done on top of partitioning as well as many usability features that we need in order to make it convenient. So I’ll be talking about those things.

My tutorial is about the PostgreSQL query planner, which I think is a topic that is of interest to a lot of people. I notice that some of the other tutorials have a similar kind of focus: why are my queries slow, and how do I make them faster?

What is the audience for your talk?

It’s basically a technical talk, but it is not intended only for very advanced users. Basically, what I want to do is make the topic of partitioning and the status of the partitioning feature understandable for anyone who is interested in the technology but doesn’t have time to follow all of the email discussion on pgsql-hackers in detail.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

I try not to presume too much knowledge, but it’s probably good if you are understand SQL commands like CREATE TABLE. It will also be helpful if you have some familiarity with what EXPLAIN output looks like, although I will try to explain the basics in the course of the talk for those who may not be familiar.