Jimmy Angelakos in a kilt on stage at Community Over Code Glasgow 2026, with lightning talk hosts Brian Proffitt and Ruth Suehle

Last month, the Apache Software Foundation's Community Over Code came to Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, taking place from October 11th to 14th at the Hilton Glasgow. Even though I've been in the open source world for 25+ years, this was my first Community Over Code (!), and I loved it: great talks, an amazing hallway track with Apache community rockstars, and a Community track that I very much enjoyed. I also came away convinced that there is huge potential for synergy between the Apache data ecosystem and the PostgreSQL community.

Many thanks to the ASF and everyone who made Community Over Code Glasgow 2026 possible.

The lightning talk: ColdFront

ColdFront didn't exist yet when the Call for Presentations closed, so I submitted it as a lightning talk at the last minute. On Wednesday, October 14th, I had the pleasure of presenting ColdFront: Transparent PostgreSQL Tiering to Iceberg. It was also my first lightning talk under these rules: five minutes, no laptop, no slides! Many thanks to Ruth Suehle and Brian Proffitt of the ASF for hosting.

ColdFront is one example of that synergy: it moves data from PostgreSQL to Apache Iceberg transparently, so your application keeps using plain PostgreSQL. We covered:

  • Moving old data that nobody reads to cheaper storage, while keeping it accessible for compliance.
  • The UNIX/KISS philosophy, with PostgreSQL as the interface, DuckDB reading and writing Iceberg, and Lakekeeper as the catalog.
  • Tiered mode, where older data moves to Iceberg automatically, and decoupled mode, where it lives there from the first row.
  • Decoupled storage and compute, so you can scale out reads, and writes too with active-active Spock.
  • A writable cold tier, with UPDATE, MERGE, ALTER TABLE and everything else you would expect, that successfully runs all 99 queries of TPC-DS.
  • Lamport's bakery algorithm preventing write conflicts between nodes, formally verified in TLA+.
  • Vector search for free, using Parquet row group statistics as inverted indexes.

The recording is below. There are no slides, for obvious reasons!

🎞️ Video on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=W5bWfGIAjgw

I also used the last few seconds to invite everyone to our PostgreSQL Edinburgh meetup the following evening, only an hour away. You can read how that went in the October meetup recap, and find upcoming Postgres events in Scotland at postgres.scot.

Next stop: 1.0.0

I hope I managed to convey how excited I am about ColdFront! We are now at 1.0.0-beta3 and inching towards the stable 1.0.0 release, so stand by for news, and a detailed blog post, very soon. In the meantime, ColdFront is open source under the PostgreSQL Licence, so please give it a try: