Photo gallery: Microsoft team at Postgres Summit US 2026
Postgres Summit US 2026 was a conference of connections: between database internals and the infrastructure underneath them, between AI ideas and production engineering, and between the people building PostgreSQL today and those who will carry it forward. For anyone who could not be in New York, this report captures the talks, technical questions, hallway conversations, and community moments that defined the week.
The event also opened a new chapter. After years as PGConf NYC, the conference returned as Postgres Summit US, bringing more than 240 developers, DBAs, architects, contributors, technology leaders, and partners to Convene on Broadway from September 30 through October 2. The Microsoft team contributed six sessions across performance, replication, infrastructure, benchmarking, AI, developer tools, and community sustainability. Around those talks was a much larger program shaped by speakers and attendees from across the PostgreSQL ecosystem.
01 - Microsoft speaker highlights
02 - What the wider program was talking about
03 - Workshops and the hallway track
04 - The conversations continued after the slides
05 - What we brought home from New York
06 - Explore the Postgres Summit US 2026 program
Gratitude for the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees
01 - Microsoft speaker highlights
Abe Omorogbe and Jared Meade: "Tour of Postgres on Azure with HorizonDB, Agentic workflows, & VS Code." Their end-to-end tour moved from HorizonDB's shared-storage architecture, rapid failover, and elastic read scale to SQL-declared chunking and embedding pipelines, durable incremental processing, intelligent product search, Copilot CLI Postgres skills, and an interactive VS Code query-plan visualizer. Although the demos used Microsoft technology, the engineering message applied broadly: production AI needs a dependable data layer, observable workflows, and tools that help developers understand what the database is doing. Microsoft Azure HorizonDB Documentation Landing Page | Microsoft Learn
Claire Giordano delivered two talks that connected PostgreSQL's technical foundations with its future. In "A Secret Decoder Ring for Postgres Replication: A Beginner's Guide," Claire turned the alphabet soup of logical, physical, streaming, synchronous, and asynchronous replication into approachable mental models tied to high availability, disaster recovery, read scaling, migrations, WAL, and Patroni.
- Slides from Claire's talk: A Secret Decoder Ring for Postgres Replication: A Beginner's Guide
In Claire Giordano's talk, "Building the next generation of Postgres contributors: what's working & what's getting in the way," she marked PostgreSQL's 30th anniversary by examining the project through three lenses: the soul of its people and culture, the machine of its workflows and governance, and the fuel of economics and funding. Together, the talks asked both how PostgreSQL keeps data moving and how the community keeps itself moving.
- Slides from Claire's talk: Building the next generation of Postgres contributors: what's working & what's getting in the way
Divya Bhargov: "Same Postgres, Moving Ground: How Infrastructure Changes Shape Database Behavior." Divya explored a production reality that applies to every environment: PostgreSQL can remain stable while VM families, storage layers, operating systems, kernels, and networking stacks change underneath it. Drawing from large-scale operational experience, she showed why teams should correlate database symptoms with infrastructure transitions before assuming every behavioral change originated inside PostgreSQL.
Gayathri Paderla: "PostgreSQL Performance Mysteries: When Low IOPS Still Means High Latency." Gayathri unpacked real production cases where latency increased even though familiar signals such as IOPS, query duration, CPU pressure, and indexing did not point to the cause. The trail instead led through memory behavior, cache eviction, PostgreSQL shared buffers, the operating system page cache, and storage interactions. The session showed how to correlate pg_buffercache, pg_stat_statements, wait events, storage behavior, and cache-warming techniques such as pg_prewarm. The practical lesson was memorable: low IOPS does not mean storage is uninvolved, and a normal query metric does not mean the application is experiencing normal latency.
- Slides from Gayathri's talk: PostgreSQL Performance Mysteries When low IOPS still means high latency - Speaker Deck
Richard Yen: "Pushing PostgreSQL to the Limit: How to Benchmark Hardware with Postgres." Richard challenged the numbers used to sell hardware and cloud storage. Massive advertised IOPS or throughput does not tell a DBA whether the real limit will be storage, CPU bandwidth, PostgreSQL locks, checkpoints, archive_mode overhead, or autovacuum interference. His session focused on building an impartial PostgreSQL benchmarking harness, instrumenting both system and database metrics, and avoiding synthetic-test traps that can produce confident but misleading conclusions.
- Slides from Richard's talk: Pushing PostgreSQL to the Limit: How to Benchmark Hardware with Postgres
Photo gallery clockwise from top left: Microsoft speakers at Postgres Summit US 2026: Divya Bhargov, Jared Meade, Abe Omorogbe, Claire Giordano, Richard Yen, and Gayathri Paderla
02 - What the wider program was talking about
Beyond the Microsoft sessions, the schedule showed where PostgreSQL engineering is headed. The keynote "Lessons Learned from Developing Agentic AI Tooling for Postgres" set a practical tone for AI. Other sessions explored hybrid search, agent memory, AI-agent security, PostgreSQL 19, planner behavior, VACUUM, index prefetching, change data capture, driver maintenance, Kubernetes migrations, replication, and zero-downtime operations.
The breadth of the program mattered. Healthcare, financial services, government, SaaS, analytics, and cloud-native teams have different workloads, but they share the same production requirements: reliability, security, predictable performance, recovery, regional availability, and a clear way to choose the right platform for each workload. The question is no longer simply whether PostgreSQL is enterprise ready. It is how each organization should use PostgreSQL without creating unnecessary operational complexity.
03 - Workshops and the hallway track
The workshop track made the conference approachable for people at different stages of their PostgreSQL journey. Sessions such as "Getting Comfortable with Postgres," "Postgres DBA Basics Nobody Told You,"And "Locks, Monitoring & the Config That Matters" turned administration, configuration, troubleshooting, and performance concepts into hands-on practice. That mix of beginner-friendly learning and deep technical sessions is one of the best things about PostgreSQL conferences.
Photo gallery: hands-on learning and community conversations
04 - The conversations continued after the slides
The Day 1 reception gave everyone time to compare notes after the first full program, and many of the best exchanges continued at sponsor booths, over dinner, and between sessions. Engineers compared production lessons. Contributors heard directly from users. Teams discovered that problems they had considered unique were often shared by people at other companies. That hallway track is difficult to capture in an agenda, but it is a big reason people travel to PostgreSQL events.
Postgres Summit US is organized by the United States PostgreSQL Association (PgUS) and supported by volunteer organizers, reviewers, speakers, and sponsors. The sponsor community included cloud providers, database companies, observability vendors, and open-source specialists. Microsoft was proud to participate, but the event's real strength came from the range of people willing to share what they had built, what had failed, and what they had learned.
05 - What we brought home from New York
Microsoft brought home five key takeaways from Postgres Summit US 2026:
- Production AI is now a PostgreSQL architecture and operations discussion.
The community is moving beyond AI prototypes toward dependable data foundations, secure agent access, observable pipelines, hybrid search, and production-ready developer tooling. - Infrastructure changes can affect database behavior even when PostgreSQL itself has not changed.
VM, storage, operating-system, kernel, and networking changes must be considered when diagnosing PostgreSQL performance and reliability. - Observability and explainability are essential at scale.
Effective diagnosis requires correlating PostgreSQL internals, query behavior, memory, caching, wait events, infrastructure metrics, and storage behavior rather than relying on one familiar metric. - Organizations want to consolidate more workloads on PostgreSQL without increasing operational complexity.
Customers expect simpler operations, predictable performance, stronger recovery, high availability, and clear guidance for selecting the right PostgreSQL platform. - Community knowledge sharing remains one of PostgreSQL’s greatest strengths.
Technical sessions, workshops, hallway conversations, and candid production lessons help practitioners, contributors, and new community members learn from one another.
These takeaways reinforce Microsoft’s continued investment in PostgreSQL performance, developer experiences, AI integration, operational reliability, and open-source collaboration.
The transition from PGConf NYC to Postgres Summit US felt appropriate. The event still had the technical depth, welcoming hallway conversations, and practical learning that people value, but the scope was broader. AI-enabled applications are moving into production, PostgreSQL 19 is opening new
possibilities, and operators are asking sharper questions about reliability and performance. Microsoft will continue investing in PostgreSQL performance, developer experiences, AI integration, and open-source collaboration. We are already looking forward to the next gathering.
Microsoft booth, reception, community dinner, and New York moments
06 - Explore the Postgres Summit US 2026 program
- Conference schedule :https://postgresql.us/events/postgressummitus2026/schedule/
- Conference sessions and abstracts: https://postgresql.us/events/postgressummitus2026/sessions/
Gratitude for the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees
A conference like this only happens because many people contribute behind the scenes. Thank you to Postgres Summit US, the volunteer organizers, the program committee, the speakers who did the work behind every slide and demo, the sponsors who helped make the event possible, and the attendees who brought thoughtful questions and real production experience into every room.
To everyone who shared a lesson, asked a difficult question, demonstrated a new idea, or welcomed someone new to the community: thank you. Hopefully these photos and highlights give you a feel for the energy in New York. See you at the next PostgreSQL gathering.
Microsoft