Illinois Prairie PUG Meetup

Dear Illinois Prairie PUG members,

Thank you so much for the great start to 2026! Coming up next: our February meetup will take place on February 18. We heard an overwhelming request for a talk on the most popular topic of our times, and here it is! Shaun Thomas is up for the challenge!

Speaker: Shaun Thomas, pgEdge

Talk title:

The New Postgres AI Ecosystem

Talk Description:

We all know about pgvector these days; it's what makes AI on Postgres possible. There have been so many conference talks driven by this extension that it's easy to take for granted. But what do you do after pgvector? Is it enough to create embeddings for your content and call it a day? Of course not! Even if you know what an embedding is, that's merely the tip of the Postgres AI iceberg. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) servers come next since LLMs are fantastic at sounding confident but absolutely terrible at being correct, and adding references to their context dramatically reduces hallucinations and increases output relevance. What about Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers? You need those to act as a bridge between data and actions, allowing LLMs to reason over your real schema, run queries, and trigger actions securely. It's easy to talk about these things and theory-craft, but why imagine? PgEdge has recently introduced a content vectorizer, RAG, and MCP servers, and other related tools that make producing a full AI app stack much easier. Let me tell you about them, and how Postgres sits at the center of a whole new world, not just vibe-coded vapor-ware.

About the Speaker
Shaun has spent decades working in the Postgres ecosystem, specializing in architecture and high availability. His "PostgreSQL High Availability Cookbook" serves as a treatise to the lessons he learned over that time. Perhaps you've read something from his PG Phriday blog series over the years?

Currently, he serves as a Principal Software Engineer and Postgres SME at pgEdge, striving to help make Postgres the distributed cluster-aware platform he knows it can be!

Event location: DRW Training Center, 540 W. Madison, 25th floor.

A reminder about our venue:

- This is a high-security building, which means the names of all participants should be communicated no later than 7:30 AM on the day of the event, and all participants must present a government-issued ID to be admitted. If your meetup profile does not list your full name, please send a DM with the required information to me (Hettie). Please make sure to do so not later than the day before the meetup. Registration for all in-person events will be closed by 7-30 AM the day of the event.
- The food order will be placed a day before the event, so I strongly encourage everybody planning to attend to RSVP at least a day before.

Please RSVP to this event only if you are attending in person.
If you are planning to attend virtually, please wait for a separate meetup invite

Hope to see you there!

Hettie Dombrovskaya
Illinois Prairie PostgreSQL User Group Organizer