Conference Archives - credativ®

On Thursday, 26 June and Friday, 27 June 2025, my colleague Patrick Lauer and I had the amazing opportunity to attend Swiss PGDay 2025, held at the OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil. This two-day PostgreSQL conference featured two parallel tracks of presentations in English and German, bringing together users and experts primarily from across Switzerland. Our company, credativ, was among the supporters of this year’s conference.

During the event, Patrick delivered an engaging session titled “Postgres with many data: To MAXINT and beyond,” which built on past discussions about massive-scale Postgres usage. He highlighted the practical issues that arise when handling extremely large datasets in PostgreSQL – for instance, how even a simple SELECT COUNT(*) can become painfully slow, and how backups and restores can take days on very large datasets. He also shared strategies to manage performance effectively at these scales.

I presented a significantly updated version of my talk, “Building a Data Lakehouse with PostgreSQL: Dive into Formats, Tools, Techniques, and Strategies.” It covered modern data formats and frameworks such as Apache Iceberg, addressing key challenges in lakehouse architectures – from governance, privacy, and compliance, to data quality checks and AI/ML use cases. The talk emphasized PostgreSQL’s capability to play a central role in today’s data lakehouse and AI landscape. At the close of the conference, I delivered a brief lightning talk showcasing our new open-source migration tool, “credativ-pg-migrator.”

 
(c) photos by Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek

The conference schedule was packed with many high-quality, insightful talks. We would particularly like to highlight:

* Bruce Momjian – “How Open Source and Democracy Drive Postgres”: In his keynote, Bruce Momjian outlined how PostgreSQL’s open-source development model and democratic governance have powered its success. He explained the differences between open-source and proprietary models, reviewed PostgreSQL’s governance history, and illustrated how democratic, open processes result in robust software and a promising future for Postgres.

* Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek – “Anatomy of Table-Level Locks in PostgreSQL”: session covered the fundamentals of PostgreSQL’s table-level locking mechanisms. Explained how different lock modes are acquired and queued during schema changes, helping attendees understand how to manage lock conflicts, minimize downtime, and avoid deadlocks during high-concurrency DDL operations.

* Aarno Aukia – “Operating PostgreSQL at Scale: Lessons from Hundreds of Instances in Regulated Private Clouds”: the speaker shared lessons from running extensive Postgres environments in highly regulated industries. He discussed architectural patterns, automation strategies, and “day-2 operations” practices that VSHN uses to meet stringent availability, compliance, and audit requirements, including secure multi-tenancy, declarative deployments, backups, monitoring, and lifecycle management in mission-critical cloud-native setups.

* Bertrand Hartwig-Peillon – “pgAssistant”: Author introduced pgAssistant, an open-source tool designed to help developers optimize PostgreSQL schemas and queries before production deployment. He demonstrated how pgAssistant combines deterministic analysis with an AI-driven approach to detect schema inconsistencies and suggest optimizations, effectively automating best practices and performance tuning within development workflows.

* Gianni Ciolli – “The Why and What of WAL”: Gianni Ciolli provided in a great Italian style concise history and overview of PostgreSQL’s Write-Ahead Log (WAL). He explained WAL’s central role in PostgreSQL for crash safety, backups, and replication, showcasing examples of WAL-enabled features like fast crash recovery, efficient hot backups, physical replication, and logical decoding.

* Daniel Krefl – “Hacking pgvector for performance”: The speaker presented an enhanced version of the pgvector extension for massive data processing, optimized by maintaining the vector index outside PostgreSQL memory and offloading computations, including GPU integration. He detailed the process of moving pgvector’s core logic externally for improved speed, demonstrating notable performance gains in the EU AERO project context. He also talked about distributed PostgreSQL XC, XL and TBase, which are unfortunately stuck on the old version 10 and how he ported changes from these projects into the version 16.

* Luigi Nardi – “A benchmark study on the impact of PostgreSQL server parameter tuning”: Luigi Nardi presented comprehensive benchmark results on tuning PostgreSQL configuration parameters. Highlighting that many users default settings, he demonstrated how significant performance improvements can be achieved through proper tuning across various workloads (OLTP, OLAP, etc.), providing actionable insights tailored to specific environments.

* Renzo Dani – “From Oracle to PostgreSQL: A HARD Journey and an Open-Source Awakening”: Author recounted his experiences migrating a complex enterprise application from Oracle to PostgreSQL, addressing significant challenges such as implicit type casting, function overloading differences, JDBC driver issues, and SQL validation problems. He also highlighted the benefits, including faster CI pipelines, more flexible deployments, and innovation opportunities provided by open-source Postgres, along with practical advice on migration tools, testing strategies, and managing trade-offs.


(c) photo by Swiss PostgreSQL User Group

At the end of the first day, all participants enjoyed a networking dinner. We both want to sincerely thank the Swiss PGDay organizers (Swiss PostgreSQL User Group) for an amazing event. Swiss PGDay 2025 was a memorable and valuable experience, offering great learning and networking opportunities. We are also very grateful to credativ for enabling our participation, and we look forward to future editions of this excellent conference.

The Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day (P2D2) is a well-established Czech PostgreSQL conference. This year’s 17th edition was exceptional, with 275 registered visitors and 16 talks across two tracks. Notably, several major PostgreSQL contributors and core members were present, underlining the event’s significance. Tomas Vondra, as in previous years, organized the conference. Bruce Momjian, Vice President and Postgres Evangelist at EDB, led a half-day workshop titled “Postgres & AI: From the Trenches to the Sky.” Robert Haas delivered a really interesting talk on Incremental Backup in PostgreSQL 17, a feature he developed.

I had the fantastic opportunity to contribute to this conference with my new talk, “Building a Data Lakehouse with PostgreSQL: Dive into Formats, Tools, Techniques, and Strategies.” Given the still evolving nature of this topic and the varying definitions of data lakehouses, I covered the most important areas, highlighting the functionalities and extensions PostgreSQL offers. I received very positive feedback on my talk and had several insightful discussions about the topic with different people.

Among the talks I attended, I particularly enjoyed Robert Haas’s presentation on Incremental Backups, the practical demonstration of PostgreSQL statistics in the talk “Statistics: How PostgreSQL Counts Without Counting” by Sadeq Dousti, and the very interesting presentation “Anatomy of Table-Level Locks in PostgreSQL” by Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek. She explained in detail the hierarchy of different locking levels and the events leading to delays in operations due to locks. Other notable talks included “Replicating Schema Changes with PostgreSQL” by Esther Miñano and “When Autovacuum Met FinOps: A Cloud Romance” by Mayuresh Bagayatkar. You can find summaries of all talks and soon also the slides on the P2D2 website. I want to express my gratitude to all the organizers of this amazing event, especially Tomas Vondra and Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek, who both do a great job in organizing PostgreSQL events not only in the Czech Republic.

 (c) Tomas Vondra EDB & organizers of P2D2 conference

DebConf 2024 from 28. July to 4. Aug 2024 https://debconf24.debconf.org/

Last week the annual Debian Community Conference DebConf happend in Busan, South Korea. Four NetApp employees (Michael, Andrew, Christop and Noël) participated the whole week at the Pukyong National University. The camp takes place before the conference, where the infrastructure is set up and the first collaborations take place. The camp is described in a separate article: https://www.credativ.de/en/blog/credativ-inside/debcamp-bootstrap-for-debconf24/
There was a heat wave with high humidity in Korea at the time but the venue and accommodation at the University are air conditioned so collaboration work, talks and BoF were possible under the circumstances.

Around 400 Debian enthusiasts from all over the world were onsite and additional people attended remotly with the video streaming and the Matrix online chat #debconf:matrix.debian.social

The content team created a schedule with different aspects of Debian; technical, social, political,….
https://debconf24.debconf.org/schedule/

There were two bigger announcements during DebConf24:

  1. the new distribution eLxr https://elxr.org/ based on Debian initiated by Windriver
    https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/138-a-unified-approach-for-intelligent-deployments-at-the-edge/
    Two takeaway points I understood from this talk is Windriver wants to exchange CentOS and preferes a binary distribution.
  2. The Debian package management system will get a new solver https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/8-the-new-apt-solver/

The list of interesting talks is much longer from a full conference week. Most talks and BoF were streamed live and the recordings can be found in the video archive:
https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2024/DebConf24/

It is a tradtion to have a Daytrip for socializing and get a more interesting view of the city and the country. https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/24/DayTrip/ (sorry the details of the three Daytrip are on the website for participants).

For the annual conference group photo we have to go outsite into the heat with high humidity but I hope you will not see us sweeting.

The Debian Conference 2025 will be in July in Brest, France: https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/25/ and we will be there.:) Maybe it will be a chance for you to join us.

See also Debian News: DebConf24 closes in Busan and DebConf25 dates announced

Introduction

For the first time ever, one of our colleagues had the chance to visit the North American edition of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Chicago this year.

Our colleague Michael Sprengel who already works 8 years for credativ and has gained a lot of experiences with Kubernetes and the development of Kubernetes controllers in that time, is sharing his experiences from KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2023.

So with no further ado, let’s hand it over to our colleague Michael.

Come fly with me back to Chicago

Hi folks, my name is Michael Sprengel – Professional Service Consultant here at credativ – and I want to share my experiences with you from this year’s KubeCon / CloudNativeCon in North America. So come with me and let me give you a first person view of all the talks and things that I was able to experience here in Chicago. You may not had the chance to visit the North American edition of KubeCon so far, so this is the best chance for you to get some insights which could make you think of also attending KubeCon and CloudNativeCon next year then.

Those editions will take place in Paris and Salt Lake City.

Chicago – The Windy City

The good thing about such conferences is not only the possibility to attend talks and learn about new technologies that you can use in daily projects but it’s also an opportunity to learn new cultures and leave with a bag full of new memories.

This year, the conference took place in Chicago that is also known as the Windy City. I was lucky enough to arrive on Saturday, so that I had a chance to pack my backpack and pay Chicago a visit a day before the conference started. Hereby, I was able to check some of Chicago’s well known sights like for example Lake Michigan or the mighty Millennium Park in the center of Downtown Chicago.

The only downfall to this was that Chicago’s Cloud Gate that is also known as The Bean. This landmark is currently under construction at, so that I could only take a picture through some construction fences. But other than that, the city has a lot to offer like Deep Dish and Thin Crust Pizza or some university you may want to visit. Chicago is definitely worth it.

Day 1: Operator Day

Besides of this wonderful city, the actual conference has also a lot to offer. If you’re lucky enough to get a All-access pass for KubeCon, you can already visit some CNCF-hosted Co-located events near the venue. But don’t worry. Even if you don’t have such a pass, you can attend some virtual events already.

For me personally, I attended the so called Operator Day by Canonical. It’s a full day event that takes place from 9am to 4pm. It gave me some pretty good insights in implementing Kubernetes operators the Canonical way by using Juju.

Unfortunately, the current edition from Chicago isn’t online so far, but you can check out the last Operator Day from Europe by watching the videos below:

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Day 2: First experiences from the venue

The second day was really mind blowing. If you never attended such a conference before, you will be surprised by the amount of talks as well as by the size of the actual venue.

After arriving at the venue, I had a chance to grab a breakfast and a coffee as well as attend the Opening Remarks in which leading Kubernetes and CNCF developers, engineers and ambassadors highlight the latest and greatest changes in Kubernetes and the CNCF space. Here, you could really feel how Machine Learning and AI is influencing Kubernetes and how features are added to this project to better support ML/AI.

Next to this, you have a big variety of talks that you can attend or you can go to the Solutions Showcase where all the major companies and sponsors have their booth. There, you can talk to maintainers or get in touch with companies that are using CNCF related projects or Kubernetes in their business. Typically some booths also offer so called Lightning Talks. These are like general talks but they tend to be shorter than the usual ones and they are mostly focusing on hands on sessions or live demos.

Day 3/4: Talks, talks and some more talks

In general, I was able to attend a lot of talks during the conference. Some of them were exactly what I was expecting and others however surprised me. Thereby, I visited the following talks:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

The Service Mesh Battle Scars talk was one of the talks that surprised me, because it was basically and public battle between the maintainers of the biggest Service Mesh solutions in Kubernetes.

  1. Cilium
  2. Istio
  3. linkerd

It surprised me because it was quite interesting to see how each of those projects were arguing differently to specific topics like transport encryption as well as Sidecar, Sideless or Ambient mode. As an attendee, you could really get a feeling of what thoughts each project put into specific topics before realizing them. Especially the topic about encryption caught my attention. Istio and linkerd simply use mTLS for encryption, whereas Cilium now tries to use TLS for the initial handshake while using the resulting encryption key for IPSec to implement transport encryption. This concept led to a heavy discussion if this approach is still considered to be secure since Cilium is only reusing some part of TLS instead of using it completely and usually reusing well known and accepted security algorithms is always preferred in modern IT.

Next to this, it was also pleasing to attend the Spotify talk in which Tim Hansen explained how the engineers at Spotify implement GitOps and what effort it takes to create a new project / repository that should be deployed on production. Spotify uses some self-written solutions to achieve this and overcome some limitation that already existing solutions might have. For building and deploying for example, Spotify uses their own CI/CD solution Tingle. Tingle was created in 2017 to serve as the centralized CI/CD system for backend, data and web services and it thereby replaced 200 stand-alone Jenkins machines. More information about this, can be found here:

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Although this talk mainly focused on Spotify and their GitOps tools, the presenter also showcased open source tools which helps to accomplish similar functionality without relying on Spotify’s own tools.

Overall, the majority of talks really helped me to broaden my knowledge regarding Kubernetes and the solutions out there. Only some talks didn’t match my expectation, but even then you still have plenty of other talks to choose from.

Get the first person view

If you want to get an idea of how such a conference looks like, I create three videos which let you experience the conference similar to what I was able to experience. Give it a try and visit KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2023 with me again!

Conclusion

Having the opportunity to travel to Chicago and experience KubeCon and CloudNativeCon for the first time was an one in the lifetime experiences. You not only have the chance to get insights to so many CNCF related projects but it’s also a good opportunity to get in touch with developers, engineers, managers and other people who use Kubernetes on daily basis. If you have the chance to visit such a conference, I would highly recommend to take the chance and attend them.

On KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, I learned a lot about new stuff and got an idea of design decision that probably will help me to solve some upcoming challenges in one of my own projects and which I wouldn’t know about if I hadn’t attended this conference. Thereby, one quote from Dr. Angel Diaz, VP Technology Capabilities & Innovation at Discover Financial Services really stick to my head:

Code, Community, Culture

And this is what it’s all about. You not only learn new stuff that you can use in your code, but you become a part of a community and get use to a culture which enables you to contribute to projects that are the baseline of most of our daily projects.

With a lot of Deep Dish Pizza in my stomach and a lot of new knowledge in my head, I’m happy to return from KubeCon North America and start working on my Kubernetes projects again.

Thanks for sticking around with me and I hope to see you on next year’s KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, too.

And by the way, if you’re searching for experts in Kubernetes and CNCF related topics, give our sales department a call and we might be able to help you with that.