Back from PGConf.DE 2024
Last Friday (April 12, 2024) happened, with a record of 270 registrations, the 8th annual PGConf.DE in Munich, Germany.
There definitely was a great lineup: 1 German track, 2 English tracks and 1 sponsors track.
While my awesome colleague Valeria was speaking about Navigating the Postgres community, I attended Martín Marqués talk about Postgres native incremental backups.
If you’re following the -hackers mailing list, you may have noticed that it is a hot topic at the moment. PostgreSQL 17 should receive the possibility to take incremental backups with pg_basebackup. Even though I think this is a first step in adding more backups capabilities in core, the need of orchestration (pg_basebackup, pg_verifybackup, pg_combinebackup, WAL archives and retention management,…) just grew even more. I’m still convinced that users should use external tools driven by the community (yes, pgBackRest I’m looking at you) compared to what is currently available. However, I’m really curious (and excited) to see the new WAL summarizer process in action and how other tools could benefit from it! Anyway, kudos to all the contributors who worked on that feature!
To be honest, I haven’t attended a lot of other talks, because it was so great to have so many talks with other attendees that time flew so fast!
Not speaking German, I had to miss the fantastic Sichere dein pgBackRest gegen Ransomware! talk given by Gunnar „Nick“ Bluth. You kinda know how much I care about that tool and I was sad to miss it.
To refuel some energy, I took a cruise in the PostgreSQL Seas with Lætitia AVROT (dressed as Nami from One Piece), looking for some Hidden Treasures (pattern matching, complex datatypes handling,…).
It really was a great conference, kudos to all the volunteers who organized it and all the #PostgresFriends there!
And now, do you want more Postgres content in Germany? Then you should look for the local user groups!
As Andreas pointed out to Valeria’s talk, there are some meetups always looking for new speakers and hosts:
(The dates might have changed, so please check following the links in Valeria’s slides)
What’s next for me?
I didn’t had the chance to speak at PGConf.DE this year (so I could just relax and enjoy the hallway chats) but I’ll be holding the mic already this week on Thursday April 18, where I’ll be giving a free webinar about PostgreSQL Backups.
Then, following up on that subject, I’ll be speaking about Mastering PostgreSQL Recovery: Beyond Backup Basics at the Belgium PGDay on May 7 and also about pgBackRest Frequently Asked Questions at the PostgreSQL User Group NRW MeetUp in Aachen on May 15.
The upcoming weeks are quite exciting again. Where will we see each other next? 🙂
