In this world of all things digital where so many of us are online so much of the time—what with architecting, coding, QA'ing, blogging, and slacking—it’s kind of refreshing to step away from our devices and talk to other humans face-to-face at an event.

Especially when it’s a conference chock full of PostgreSQL open source people, from users to developers to community leaders.

Especially when it’s right in our own backyard here in San Francisco.

Especially when it’s PostgresOpen SV 2018.

While Citus Data is a global team—our engineering team is distributed across 5 countries from Canada to the US to Amsterdam to France to Turkey—our headquarters is South of Market in San Francisco, and our SF office is practically walking distance from the conference.

Ok, well, maybe it’s a bit too far to walk. But the point is, you could walk if you wanted to.

PostgresOpen SV 2018 will be in San Francisco on Sep 5-7

Just like last year, PostgresOpen SV will take place at the Parc 55 Hilton Hotel in SF—and bills itself as two days packed with rich PostgreSQL talks and sessions, plus another day of tutorials and trainings.

San Francisco is lovely in September, with amazing food at a million different restaurants, beautiful sunsets and views of the Golden Gate if you go for a walk at Crissy Field, and hills with trolley cars for your hill-riding pleasure. The weather is, well, I’m not a meteorologist, so who knows what it’ll be, but if you’re lucky you’ll get to see some of the ethereal fog that Karl the Fog’s twitter feed raves about.

The reason most of us like PostgresOpen SV: the people and the conversations.

Oh, and the Parc 55 Hilton Hotel is right off BART (one of our public transportation options in the Bay Area, that connects you to the SFO airport as well as Oakland and the East Bay) and within a 5 minute walk from shopping at Union Square. Once you arrive at the venue, you don’t even need to take a taxi, nor a Lyft, nor an Uber.

We’re looking forward to all the talks about Postgres'y things

Like you’d expect, pretty much every single talk on the PostgresOpen SV agenda looks useful.

That’s not a surprise, since a lot of developers and conference speakers try to give their audience something helpful to take away, some learning that makes people’s day-to-day lives better. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that some of the talks also seem like they might be fun, too. I mean, there’s even a talk about crocodile teeth and PostgreSQL indexes—how cool is that?

And I love that a few Citus users are presenting at the conference. Engineer Sylvain Friquet of Algolia will give a talk about building a real-time analytics API at scale. And Min Wei of Microsoft will present his lessons from building VeniceDB on top of Postgres and Citus. Sweet.

Elephants continue to have an important place in the sessions

It’s a Postgres conference, so of course there will be elephants. Specifically, Slonik, the Postgres elephant.

Magnus will give his go-to talk with an elephant’s trunk look at PostgreSQL 11.

And Christophe is presenting on a herd rather than a trunk: Your Herd of Elephants: PostgreSQL Replication.

Postgres extensions keep on driving innovation

Have you ever noticed, when you’re telling a story, that one of the first clarifying question people will ask is “where was that?”

On a similar vein, when you first meet someone, one of the first getting-acquainted-type questions is “where are you from?” Location matters.

And with precision geolocation and all the great mapping technology driving so many new capabilities in people’s lives, well, of course there will be talks and tutorials at PostgresOpen about PostGIS, the spatial extension to Postgres which so many people love to love.

And there will be talks about other awesome extensions to Postgres too. Like a talk about ZomboDB, an extension that lets you combine elasticsearch indexes directly in your Postgres database. And a talk about HypoPG, a Postgres extension that analyzes your database and provides insights to what indexes you should add.

I myself am biased. Citus is my favorite open source Postgres extension, so I’m jazzed that three submissions from engineers at Citus Data made the cut.

Marco Slot is going to give a tutorial on day #1 about one of his favorite topics, architecting real-time analytics apps. Marco will cover schema designs for ingesting millions of records per second, how to perform rollups of data (both in order and out of order), how to bucket rollups—and he’ll talk about powerful sketch algorithms like TopN and HyperLogLog. This tutorial will spend a lot of time in SQL, including scheduling jobs to do all the heavy lifting directly in the database with pg_cron . And Marco will look at how to scale out Postgres and parallelize real-time workloads with the Citus extension to Postgres.

Other Citus speakers include Craig Kerstiens, who will give his super-popular talk on sharding Postgres: Five data models for sharding and which is right.

Finally, our CTO Ozgun Erdogan will give a talk on how the PostgreSQL extension APIs are changing the face of relational databases. Ozgun will explore how PostgreSQL is becoming the relational database of choice, and why a key factor in the rising popularity of Postgres is the extension APIs that allow devs to innovate on and extend the capabilities of Postgres.

Did you know there are now hundreds of Postgres extensions?

15% off discount code for PostgresOpen SV registration

If you haven’t yet registered for PostgresOpen SV, no worries, there is still time. You will need to use (or create) a postgresql.org login in order to purchase your ticket, but the process is super simple.

And while the early bird tickets are all gone, we have arranged for a 15% off discount code (aka voucher code) for Citus Data friends and community members to use. Use it, share it, and take advantage of the discount.

15% off discount code: CitusData

Hope to see you at PostgresOpen SV on Sep 5-7

My teammates and I give quite a few talks about Postgres. So if you’re planning on going to a conference and are wondering whether we’ll be there, you can always check out what events we’ll be at on our events page. It seems like I’m updating that page every week with new events and new slide decks…

And if you are coming to PostgresOpen SV this year and want to connect, just shoot us a note on our public Slack channel to plan a coffee or a meeting. Or just drop by our table when you get there… yes, we are a sponsor. :) And of course there will be socks and elicorn stickers.

Hope to see you at PostgresOpen SV in September!

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