Could you briefly introduce yourself?

Hello, my name is Joe. I have been involved with the PostgreSQL community for over 20 years in various capacities. Currently I am a PostgreSQL Committer, Major Contributor, and Infrastructure Team member. I am also VP PostgreSQL Engineering at Crunchy Data Solutions and a Board Member at the United States PostgreSQL Association (PgUS).

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

I have attended multiple previous PGConf.EU events as well as a couple of FOSDEM events, both as a speaker and as an attendee. PostgreSQL Europe always puts on excellent events, and I have very much enjoyed all that I have attended.

What will your talk be about? Why this topic?

This talk is a follow on to a talk that I have given in Europe in the past. Namely, on the topic of security and available security benchmarks for PostgreSQL. The past talks were fairly comprehensive, but by necessity very high level. This talk will briefly cover the security benchmarks (STIG and CIS), and then dive deep into a small subset of the available security topics covered by those benchmarks. The ultimate version of this talk would probably fill a few days at least, so think of this talk as a sampling from among many potential security related topics.

The reason for this topic, is that it is very topical ;-). Security has become increasingly important over many years, and these days dominates the headlines. Do you know where your data has been?

What is the audience for your talk?

The audience is anyone using or administering PostgreSQL who cares about security -- so that should be essentially everyone!

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

Decent familiarity with PostgreSQL and Linux would be helpful.

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

It isn’t one -- it is the sum total of the partitioning related improvements.

Which feature would you like to see in PostgreSQL?

CREATE VARIABLE is one of my favorites.

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

I’m sure there are many other talks I’d like to see, but I haven’t sorted that out yet. I will undoubtedly be somewhere in the vicinity of the PostgreSQL booth often during the weekend, as well as the PostgreSQL dev room on Sunday.