PGDay Lowlands Warmup Meetup 2025

Dear all,

Some initiatives are meant to be repeated!

So, in line with last year we are planning to organize a PGDay Lowlands Warmup Meetup on Thursday, September 11, 2025, the evening before PGDay Lowlands itself on Friday, September 12.

Whether you are attending PGDay Lowlands or not, this meetup is open to the entire community and is a great opportunity to meet some of the speakers and other attendees.

We’ll kick off the evening with a talk by Chris Ellis, who will showcase some Postgres features that make developers’ lives easier. Following that, Stefan Fercot from Data Egret will dive into the inner workings of PgBouncer.

In addition to these headline talks, we’ll also host Lightning Talks. If you have something to share in the PostgreSQL space, let us know, we’d love to give you the stage!

This PostgreSQL PGDay Warmup Meetup will be held at a venue to be announced, somewhere in Rotterdam.

The next day, on Friday, September 12, PGDay Lowlands will take place. PGDay Lowlands is sponsored by several companies, including OptimaData, EDB, Aiven, NibbleIT and Adyen.

PGDay Lowlands has been able to allocate a budget to facilitate this meetup with pizza and drinks.

We would like to thank the PGDay Lowlands organizing committee for making this wonderful program possible.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Agenda

18:00 – 18:30 Arrival, food and drinks

18:30 – 18:40 Welcome by PGDay Lowlands

18:45 – 19:20 Chris Ellis (renowned Postgres enthusiast) – Postgres features that will help make developers’ lives easier

PostgreSQL has a huge range of features—maybe too many. Making use of them can often simplify application development, reducing complexity and effort. We’ll explore real-world use cases I’ve encountered over the years and the PostgreSQL features that can help solve them: event scheduling & booking, task execution, searching, geolocation, unknown data, and more.

19:25 – 19.50 Stefan Fercot (Data Egret) – PgBouncer

PgBouncer is great at keeping your PostgreSQL connections under control, but its single-threaded design limits scaling on modern multi-core systems. In this talk, we’ll explore how to run multiple PgBouncer instances on the same port using SO_REUSEPORT and systemd socket activation, improving CPU utilization and supporting higher connection loads.

One challenge is query cancellation requests, which can be misrouted across instances. We’ll explain how PgBouncer’s peering capability solves this issue by allowing processes to forward cancellations to the right instance. Expect a practical walk-through of configuration files, deployment patterns, and lessons learned from real-world implementations.

19.50 - 20:00 Lightning Talks

20:00 – onwards Wrap-up, networking, and drinks

Lightning Talks
What are Lightning Talks?
A Lightning Talk is a short, focused presentation given at a conference or meetup. Unlike traditional talks, they last only a few minutes, and usually several are given in a short timeframe by different speakers. It’s an opportunity to share a quick insight, highlight a small project, or ask the audience for input.

At PostgreSQL Usergroup NL meetups, Lightning Talks provide an informal stage for participants to share their knowledge and experiences.

If you’d like to give a Lightning Talk, whether you already have a topic in mind, or just want to grab a timeslot, send us an email with your suggestion, your topic, or simply your name. We’ll make sure to add you to the lineup. You can also sign up on the evening itself!