Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Victor, I live in Latvia and work as PostgreSQL DBA at Data Egret.

I first came across this DBMS in 1998, it was 6.5 version shipped with RedHat 5.2 long before WAL.

A lot of this was very new to me, I have made many mistakes on the way and learned a lot about data, its storage and processing, about hardware that was used for the database.

This is something that I wanted to share during our tutorial on Tuesday.

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

I attended pgconf.eu conference last year for the first time. It was very well organised event and I enjoyed pretty much everything — talks, discussions and food!

It’s a great conference to attend for experienced DBAs but also for those who are new to Postgres as there is a lot one can learn.

I also enjoyed the sense of community at the conference and really looking forward for this year’s event.

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

Together with my colleague Ilya I'll be giving a training on "PostgreSQL Performance Optimization". Here are some key highlights:

• finding troublesome queries
• looking into the query and how it's being executed
• understanding query plan
• optimization approaches

I find this topic important, as one of the most common questions we get as DBAs is "Why is my database so slow?". When we get a question like that, the first thing to do is to find what actually is "slow", so that we can then analyse those queries and provide an appropriate solution.

What is the audience for your training?

I think this tutorial is a must for DBAs but also for anyone who wants to get a deeper understanding of queries, their performance and optimisation techniques.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

Understanding performance means understanding how HW, OS and PostgreSQL works and how they interact. Therefore, the more you know about memory, disks and CPUs, the easier it will be for you to follow this tutorial. This is, of course, not mandatory as we will be happy to answer any questions should they arise during or after the training.