Postgres Summit US2026

If you’re new to Postgres, replication can feel like alphabet soup: logical, physical, streaming, synchronous, asynchronous—and that’s just the core features.

This is the replication primer I wish I’d had when I first started working with Postgres. In this talk, we’ll break down the main types of replication—what’s actually different about them, how they work, and when you’d choose one over another. Expect diagrams, analogies, and zero sub-bullets as we map replication concepts to mental models you already know.

We’ll connect each approach to real-world use cases: high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), scaling reads, and migrations. Along the way, we’ll demystify WAL (the write-ahead log) and touch on how HA setups like Patroni fit into the picture.

If you’ve ever nodded along in a replication conversation while quietly looking up terms under the table, this talk is for you.