Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I’m Christophe Pettus, the CEO of PostgreSQL Experts, Inc., a boutique PostgreSQL consultancy in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve been working with PostgreSQL since the 7.1 days, as a DBA and developer.

How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?

I speak at a lot of conferences.

Have you enjoyed previous pgconf.eu or FOSDEM conferences, either as attendee or as speaker?

Yes!

What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

We frequently get brought in to situations where everything was working fine with PostgreSQL until some critical threshold got crossed, and the database system started falling apart in performance. I wanted to share some of those insights with you.

What is the audience for your talk?

DBAs and devops people responsible for PostgreSQL.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

Basic DBA/devops experience and knowledge about PostgreSQL is very valuable for context.

What is the one feature in PostgreSQL 11 which you like most?

It’s very hard to pick just one, but my personal favorite are the enhancements to ALTER TABLE … ALTER COLUMN to avoid a full table rewrite.

Which feature would you like to see in PostgreSQL?

Built-in connection pooling and management is the top of my list, followed closely by “completing” logical replication with things like DDL distribution.

FOSDEM is a very large conference. Are there any other talks you want to see? Where will people usually find you?

I use FOSDEM to sample technical topics that I wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to. But if I’m not in a random talk, I’ll be around the PostgreSQL community booth!

What’s the best way of getting involved in the PostgreSQL community, if you are new to it?

Come to your local user’s group meeting! They are invaluable resources, and you can learn a tremendous amount interacting with other PostgreSQL people. And if there is not one close to you… start one!