Tomas Vondra

About the Speaker

• What is your icebreaker for PostgreSQL events?

  For a while my best icebreaker was, I was wearing a blue elephant suit. But luckily Slonik travels a lot these days and other people are keen to take care of him. Other than that, I think it worked for me to ask people either what other Postgres events they've been to and how they liked them, and how they use Postgres. And disaster stories - a good story about how "I messed up" tends to break ice very fast.

About the Talk

• Tell us about your talk. Why did you choose this topic?

  I think it's useful to put things into perspective, to get a better sense of evolution / change over longer time periods. Not only is it interesting for judging past decisions, but it can also help with forecasting what will happen in the future. Turns out that's tricky to do based on small benchmarks we usually do.

• Who would benefit the most from your talk and why?

  I think it may be interesting for engineers working on patches related to performance.

• What existing knowledge should an attendee have?

  Some basic understanding of benchmarking should be enough. If you know what pgbench, throughput, OLTP and OLAP means, you should understand the talk just fine.

About PostgreSQL

• What is the single thing that you think differentiates PostgreSQL most from other databases?

  On the technology level, I think it's extensibility. The number of places the user can customize in some way is significant, and it allows one to handle a very broad range of workloads. On the non-technology level, I think it's the truly open-source nature of the community, with a healthy mix of collaboration and competition.

• What advice would you give to someone starting their journey with PostgreSQL?

  For engineers who want to contribute to/work on Postgres features, my advice would be to not hesitate to ask questions on the pgsql-hackers mailing list or even write to people directly. In my experience most people in the community are very keen to help, if time permits. Of course, be polite and respectful.

  Robert also organizes regular "Hacking Workshop" video calls, where people discuss topics from a talk they watched. That's a good place to either just listen to other people or ask questions about the topic.

About POSETTE & Events

• What other PostgreSQL events in 2025 are you excited about and why?

  I'm really looking forward to pgconf.dev in Montreal, both because I've never been to Montreal before, and because it'll be great to meet many of the people again after a long time. Other than that, I'm hoping to visit some of the smaller conferences nearby—pgconf.de, pgday.at and pgday.nl. And of course, pgconf.eu in Riga.