FireflyPGDay Boston 20262026-06-092026-06-091https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/08:1500:45OtherRegistrationhttps://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2296/09:0000:30Skyline RoomWelcome and OpeningWelcome to the conference! In this short session we'll kick off the day with some useful info and maybe a surprise.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2290/Regina Obe09:3000:45Skyline RoomKeynote: Where did Postgres come from?Michael Stonebraker MIT Professor, Turing Award Winner and the primary inventor of Postgres will take us through his journey of developing Postgres.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2292/Michael Stonebraker10:1500:20OtherMorning Coffee BreakCaffeine Up! Make new friends. Share Postgres stories.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2297/10:3500:45Skyline RoomDisaster Recovery -- A Process, Not a ToolHaving a backup tool installed is not a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan. A true DR plan accounts for the chaos, communication breakdowns, and decision paralysis that occur during a real outage.
This talk shifts focus from the technical commands to the strategic execution of database recovery. We will discuss how to define realistic RPO/RTO goals with business stakeholders, how to write an effective "Runbook" that an exhausted engineer can follow at 3 AM, and the critical importance of "Game Days" (simulated failures). You will leave with a template for building a DR culture that prioritizes psychological safety and rapid restoration.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2211/Richard Yen11:2500:45Skyline RoomManaging and Observing LocksA complete overview of Postgres locks, discussing their benefits and tradeoffs, and how to manage and observe them. Brief demos will be given to see locks in action, complemented with customer stories that concretize real-world problems/solutions.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2214/Brian Brennglass12:1501:00OtherNetworking LunchTime to dine and get to know your fellow attendees, speakers and sponsors.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2295/13:1500:45Skyline RoomWhat's Missing in Postgres?Postgres adds about 200 features and changes every year, yet it is missing some major ones. This talk explains what those features are, and why they have not been implemented. The features include optimizer hints, sharding, cluster file encryption (i.e., tde), global indexes, and multi-master replication.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2192/Bruce Momjian14:0500:45Skyline Roompg_plan_advice: Plan Stability and User Planner Control for PostgreSQL?PostgreSQL’s query planner attempts to estimate the runtime cost of various plans, but those estimates can be based on statistics which are sometimes misleading and can change over time. This means that the planner will sometimes switch from a good plan that runs quickly to a poor one that runs extremely slowly, sometimes without warning. At other times, even the initial choice of plan will be suboptimal. Historically, PostgreSQL has provided few ways for users to control planner behavior, making such problems difficult to prevent or resolve.
In this talk, I’ll discuss my ongoing work on pg_plan_advice, a proposed addition to PostgreSQL which aims to address this issue. pg_plan_advice is intended to serve a variety of use cases, including (1) regenerating in whole or in part a plan previously discovered to work well, (2) enforcing choice of an alternate plan that the user prefers over the one that the planner would normally select, or (3) debugging the failure of the planner to produce what the user believes to be the correct plan. In this talk, I’ll give an overview of what this module does and how it does that, what problems had to be solved in order to enable it to do those things, the current status of the patch, and the problems that remain to be solved. In addition, I’ll briefly discuss potential future features that could use this feature as scaffolding.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2177/Robert Haas14:5000:20OtherAfternoon Coffee Breakhttps://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2300/15:1000:45Skyline RoomLeveraging Patroni's synchronous replication feature to achieve high availability while running PostgreSQL on KubernetesEnsuring high availability is crucial for databases to achieve resiliency and durability. However enabling high availability while running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes poses unique challenges navigating complexities such as increased write latency, node failures, leader elections, handling replication lag etc. This talk will focus on
Architectural components of how at Datadog we run PostgreSQL on Kubernetes.
What is High availability?
Why did we want to achieve high availability and what were some of the challenges we faced.
What alternative did we consider to ensure high availability?
How did we test the impact of synchronous replication using Patroni to achieve high availability.
How we implemented synchronous replication.
How do we monitor synchronous replication and address related issues?
What has been the impact of synchronous replication in our production system.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2298/Shree Vidhya Sampath16:0000:45Skyline RoomMastering PostgreSQL Partitioning: Supercharge Performance and Simplify MaintenanceAs your database grows, the performance and maintenance of large
tables can become challenging. Fear not! PostgreSQL has the right tool for the
job: declarative table partitioning. In this talk, I will explore the benefits
of partitioning in PostgreSQL, including improved performance and simplified
maintenance.
After introducing the benefits of table partitioning, I’ll discuss the
different types of partitioning available in PostgreSQL, such as range, list,
and hash partitioning, and highlight common use cases and trade-offs.
With practical examples, I’ll demonstrate how to implement declarative
partitioning in PostgreSQL while maintaining transparency to the application.
We will also discuss some key considerations and best practices when designing
the schema for partitioning.
I’ll finish with a look at popular PostgreSQL extensions like TimescaleDB and
Citus for similar workloads.
By the end of this session, you will be able to create partitioned tables in
PostgreSQL that improve the performance and maintenance of your application,
allowing you to scale with more control than ever before.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2265/Ryan Booz16:5000:20Skyline RoomClosingFinal Send Off.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2301/Regina ObeTom Kincaid17:1001:00OtherSocial HourHang out, have fun. Have a great time, enjoy the view.https://postgresql.us/events/pgdayboston2026/schedule/session/2302/