Join us in September at the Adyen offices near Amsterdam Central train station. Contact the organizers if you would like to speak at a future event.
Program:
18:00 Doors open
18:20 Opening words
18:30 Talk 1: A Real Story of Upgrading a PostgreSQL Fleet to v18 at Fintech Scale - Huseyin Demir & Milen Blagojevic (Adyen)
19:00 Food & refreshments
19:30 Talk 2: Just enough Postgres compatibility to keep your sanity - Jelte Fennema-Nio (MotherDuck)
20:00 Talk 3 / Lightning talks
21:00 End
A Real Story of Upgrading a PostgreSQL Fleet to v18 at Fintech Scale
This talk covers why we upgraded our clusters (many exceeding 100TB and sustaining 10,000-50,000 queries per second) to PostgreSQL 18 (from v13), the version-specific wins that justified it (faster autovacuum via the radix-tree TID store, higher WAL and lock-manager concurrency, dramatically better snapshot and connection scalability, and more resilient logical and physical replication), and the operational traps that pg_upgrade quietly leaves behind, from vanishing replication slots to replica re-synchronization.
We then walk through the seven-phase, flight-checklist automation, from pre-flight inspection to taxi-to-the-gate, that let us run the same playbook safely and repeatably across the entire fleet.
Huseyin Demir (Adyen) and Milen Blagojevic are both PostgreSQL database engineers at Adyen.
Just enough Postgres compatibility to keep your sanity
Postgres has become the most popular database. Which is why many other databases claim to be "Postgres compatible". But the hard truth is: Only PostgreSQL is fully "Postgres compatible". Everyone else is just a clever imposter attempting to fool most users. But given enough users, there's always one that finds a new compatibility bug.
I've spent years perfecting this art of deception, having implemented the Postgres protocol twice: First as a maintainer of the PgBouncer connection pooler, and then when implementing the "Postgres Endpoint" for MotherDuck (a data warehouse based on DuckDB).
In this talk I'll share the interesting, funny and often horrifying lessons I learned about building Postgres compatible servers.
What you'll learn in this talk:
- How to build your own "Postgres compatible" database with just a few lines of Go code
- A deep understanding of the Postgres protocol
- Why the line between the protocol and the SQL dialect is kinda blurry
- How clients and ORMs (mis)use the system catalogs in `pg_catalog` and `information_schema`
- When to say: "This is enough!"
Jelte works on pg_duckdb at MotherDuck.
