PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2026
This years conference took place in Valencia, Spain, from Tuesday October 20 until Friday, October 23. We had a whole conference center for the conference, the Palacio de Congresos Valencia.
In previous years the first day was training, later community stuff. Now it is the last day for the community day events.
In the opening talk Magnus Hagander introduced our new big Slonik.
Member of the Talk Selection Committee
I was honoured to be part of the Talk Selection Committee and part of the DBA and Internals Subcommittee.
We had more than 450 talks submitted. Some abstracts where near a whole talk. And as the committee has to read all of them to make fair choices, that is not fair to the committee members.
Some time ago I wrote a blog post about it.
My Own Talk
This year I submitted a new version about Time Traveling PostgreSQL.
It included some new PostgreSQL 19 features.
As my computer disabled my network, the Docker container with PostgreSQL 19 release candidate 1 could be started, but not accessed.
But as a backup I had all queries and results copied in my slides. Being prepared for the worsed saved me.
Speaker Gifts
The speaker gifts where really nice and unique.
The box contains some Spanish sweets.
A glazed tile with the conference logo.
Hallway talks
Don’t underestimate the value of Hallway Talks. You can meet people again that you only meet at conferences, and you obviously can make new contacts.
Sometimes you are just doing smalltalk, sometimes it gets into ideas of how to solve a certain problem.
Sometimes a discussion ends in someone going deep down into a rabbit hole after the conference, read the block Radim Marek “Getting rid of a 4 TB table in PostgreSQL”.
Talks I Attended
I did not attend as much talks as I had planned to. But this year all talks where recorded if the speakers agreed to taking the videos.
There will be a lot of talks I have to see as soon as the videos are published on PostgreSQL Europe YouTube channel.
Nobody Gets to Be Superuser (Until I Broke In)
Mehmet Ince gave a great talk how he made PostgreSQL better and more secure to all of its users. He used AI to find security holes in PostgreSQL itself and the big companies offering PostgreSQL as managed cloud solutions.
This is one of the really good use cases to use AI, as it is a pattern search. And LLMs are very good in this field if trained good.
The talk was not recorded to keep some content at least a bit of confidential. But AFAIK Mehmet might give this talk at some meetups.
It Works on My Database
Radim Marek showed us that statistics are there to help developers getting better performance without having to test on production.
The video will be worth watching, when it is out.
Is PostgreSQL On My Raspberry Pi Faster Than Your Cloud Instance
Chris Ellis showed that his Raspberry Pie could be faster than the clouds.
Make sure you watch the video of this talk, it is a lot of fun.
The Pushdown: Building a Foreign Data Wrapper
David Wheeler showed how to implement several features into a foreign data wrapper with examples about what he did with the Clickhouse foreign data wrapper.
Due to the illness of another speaker I could attend my personal favourite of Davids talks as this was a reserve talk. And he was able to give it on a very short notice.
PostgreSQL Logging in Practice
Alicja Kucharczyk talk was great and she made it a 25 minute talk. The content and her knowledge would have been worth the a 45 minutes talk.
Nevertheless, make sure to watch the video when it is out.
The Community Day
My Friday started with a personal horror show: I lost my mobile in a car of Bolt. It took me all day to get it back.
The first session was a meetup of the Open Alliance for PostgreSQL Education.
As ProOpenSource is a supporter of this new organisation, I was interested in being part of the discussion about what already was done, and what to do and to expect in the future.
In addition there have been two sessions with the Open Alliance for PostgreSQL Education DBA-1 exams, one in the morning, one in the afternoon.
I took part in the afternoon exams, but I seriously can’t say if I passed. My mobile doing siteseeing in Valencia was dominantly in my head.
