PostgreSQL User Group NL Meetup 30th May 2024

Dear all,
We are happy to invite you to the 2nd meetup of 2024 of thé PostgreSQL meetup group of thé Dutch Postgres community on Thursday, May 30th.!

First of all we would like to point that that our meetup group now consists of 839 members. These are all working and active PostgreSQL professionals in the Netherlands who are part of the Postgres community. The PostgreSQL Usergroup NL is an officially registered "local chapter" (PUG) of the PostgreSQL community.

On May 30th we our welcome at HCS Company in Amsterdam and have a great line-up consisting of 2 ‘friends from the show’ who will give a talk this evening. Feike Steenbergen will kick off and take us through his experiences with efficient insertion of bulkdata using the available tools in PostgreSQL. Then Boriss Mejias (co-author of the latest PostgreSQL 16 cookbook!) will take you through all the possibilities that PGVector offers.
In addition to these headliners, we offer the opportunity to participate in the Lightning Talks. If you have something to share in the PostgreSQL space, let us know and we'll be happy to give you the floor.
This PostgreSQL Meetup will be held at the HCS Company office in Amsterdam. Food and drinks are provided.

Many thanks to HCS for their hospitality!!! Registration through Meetup.com is required.
We look forward to meet and talk on May 30th.
Feike Steenbergen
Gerard- Zuidweg

Program
17:30 - 18:15:
Doors open and drinks

18:15 - 18.20
Welcome by Gerard Zuidweg - OptimaData

18.20-18.30
Intro by HCS Company
by Rick Venema
In an era where legacy databases need to be migrated, the battle between containerized PostgreSQL and virtualized Db2 intensifies in our organisation. Harnessing the power of CloudNativePG for PostgreSQL deployment and HammerDB I will show how containerized PostgreSQL compares to virtualized Db2. Join me as I delve into the performance differences between PostgreSQL and Db2.

18:30 - 19:10
Streamlining Bulk Data Insertion in PostgreSQL
By Feike Steenbergen – Staff Engineer TimeScale
While working on a new product that uses a lot of bulk inserts, we started to really appreciate the tools available in PostgreSQL to insert large amounts of data with the least amount of performance impact on the database.
One of the features that has been available since PostgreSQL 15 is MERGE, which extends the possibilities of INSERT ON CONFLICT so you can ingest your data efficiently with only 1 statement.
We'll go through the semantics of MERGE, when to use it and show some examples of why it is useful and when it is more performant.
One usecase is to have the most recent data readily available in a single table, yet also retain the whole history of the data in different tables.
We'll show how setting up temporary tables, MERGE, COPY and a few triggers simplifies our application, gives us great performance for getting the latest data, while still allowing us to query the whole history in (partitioned) tables.
NOTE: I work for TimescaleDB ;-). If time permits, we can take a look at how TimescaleDB can be used to compress older data, reducing the disk-space requirement of the data without losing
any details.

Very short Break

19.15 – 19.55
Pgvector - What the buzz with the vector databases in PostgreSQL
By Boriss Mejias – Solution Architect EDB
Yet another talk on vector databases in PostgreSQL, and yes, yet again with the pgvector extension. So let’s iterate once again on the topic so that we probably get it right. The multi-dimensional representation of data using vectors enables programs to see data in a structured way that allows them to search and compare data in the forms of images, audio or text. This is especially interesting for deductive behavior in artificial intelligence.

Now, Postgres is an object-relational database that does not yet have vector capabilities in core, and that is why the extension pgvector comes into the game to convert Postgres in a vector database.
Postgres has established itself as a core capability of today’s digital transformation. This talk will explore the role Postgres plays in the IT stack, and what drove that phenomenal success. It will also look at the key requirements of new applications, as they pertain to Postgres. The talk ends with a discussion of the next frontiers for data driven applications: accelerated transformation, distributed systems, analytics, and AI.

19.55 - 20:00: Lightning Talks

20:00- 20:30: Wrap up and drinks