PGConf NYC 2023 Event Recap

I was happy to be back in NYC for PGConf NYC 2023 – last year was a great experience! This event brought together developers, DBAs, researchers, decision-makers, and contributors to the open-source PostgreSQL community. The Datavail team also met with their cloud partners Microsoft and AWS.

Datavail was once again a Gold sponsor, and we gave away Beer for a Year, Datavailopoly, the only board game for DBAs, by DBAs, and other fun prizes.

PGConf NYC 2023 featured a wide range of sessions and activities. There was a lot of buzz around the release of PostgreSQL 16, new database trends, and of course, generative AI. A few sessions I want to highlight in this recap include:

• Supporting GenAI workloads in PostgreSQL: Shayon Sanyal, AWS, delivered an insightful talk about the integration of embeddings generated using large language models (LLMs) with the pgvector open-source extension for PostgreSQL. This integration offers a powerful solution for optimizing the product catalog similarity search experience through pre-trained ML models and vector embeddings.
• Trusted Language Extension for PostgreSQL: Peter Celentano and Sukhpreet Kaur Bedi, both AWS, shared their expertise on adding custom extensions to PostgreSQL without writing them in C. It focused on leveraging Trusted Language Extensions for PostgreSQL on AWS, utilizing trusted PostgreSQL languages such as PL/pgSQL, Perl, and Rust.
• What’s new in PostgreSQL 16: Magnus Hagander, PostgreSQL Core Team, dove into the exciting new features and capabilities of PostgreSQL 16.

I also gave a PGConf NYC 2023 presentation on Upgrading and Testing Rollback of a Multi-TB Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Database Using Blue-Green Deployment.

Upgrading large, multi-TB databases to higher versions requires a lot of planning and testing. There are several methods you can use to perform Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL upgrades. In this session, I went over how to use Amazon Aurora’s rapid database cloning feature for a real-world Blue-Green deployment approach with near-zero downtime. In my presentation, I also covered other use cases of Aurora PostgreSQL blue/green deployment.

PGConf NYC 2023 was a great event and I look forward to next year!