For those of you who didn’t make it to PGConf NYC 2025 in midtown Manhattan last week, you missed out! But that’s OK, all is not lost. The three galleries of photographs below will give you a visual peek into what happened—and many speakers are publishing their slides online, which you can find via the PGConf NYC Schedule page.
New Yorkers will be the first to tell you that New York City is one of the biggest centers for global commerce—and while they're biased, there is also truth in it. A lot of business happens in and around NYC. So it wasn’t a surprise that the hallways of PGConf NYC were overrun by senior technologists from financial services institutions such as Bank of Georgia, Barclays, Bloomberg, Citadel, Citigroup, Goldman, Millenium, JPMorgan, RBC, UBS, and more.
There were a lot of Postgres practitioners in attendance. People attend conferences for lots of different reasons but it’s safe to assume that many of the people came to learn from the Postgres contributors, from the speakers, and from each other.
In this trip report from PGConf NYC 2025 you’ll get highlights from some talks, quotes from attendees, my gratitude for the organizers (and the sponsors!)—plus a lot of photographs. Table of contents:
- So many good talks and speakers
- Overheard: Why do people go to PGConf NYC?
- Gratitude for organizers, speakers, & sponsors
- Photo Gallery of Speakers
- Photo Gallery of Vibes
- Photo Gallery with Microsoft team at PGConf NYC
So many good talks and speakers
I can’t possibly cover all the useful, expert talks on the PGConf NYC schedule, but I’ll share a few highlights of a few talks:
- A Look at the Elephant’s Trunk – PostgreSQL 18: Magnus Hagander of Redpill Linpro gave an overview of the new features in Postgres 18. This a popular talk that Magnus repeats for each new release—and for obvious reasons, it’s useful. [Link to abstract; link to slides]
- AIO in PG 18 and Beyond: Andres Freund of Microsoft gave a talk about the big architectural step-change in Postgres 18: the addition of Asynchronous I/O reads support. The talk aimed to help people understand what you can get out of AIO—and included lots of performance benchmark results. If you’re planning to attend PGConf EU 2025 in Latvia in a few weeks, this topic is so important that Andres will be giving this AIO talk again there. [Link to abstract; link to slides]
- Database Modeling to Study the New York Jazz Scene: Boriss Mejías from EDB delivered this talk that wove together database schema modeling with the rich history of jazz music in NYC. Somehow the use of jazz performances made the database schema insights all the more fascinating. This was a brilliant talk. [Link to abstract; link to slides]
- Improved Freezing in Postgres Vacuum: From Idea to Commit: Melanie Plageman of Microsoft presented this talk about vacuum which was surprisingly fun (who knew vacuum could be so interesting?) And while it was a hacker’s story about the various approaches she took in order to improve Postgres vacuum, the talk was also useful for Postgres practitioners looking to understand vacuum more deeply. [Link to abstract]
- KEYNOTE: What Microsoft is Building for Postgres – 2025 in Review: I was so excited to have the chance to give the Microsoft keynote again this year… in which I shared a birds-eye view of all the Postgres work happening at Microsoft in open source, in the cloud, and in the community. The talk was based on a deep-dive blog post I wrote back in May, about "What's new with Postgres at Microsoft". [Link to slides]
- Postgres on Azure – Accelerating Performance, AI, and Developer Workflows: Divya Bhargov & Maxim Lukiyanov co-presented the Microsoft sponsored talk to a nearly-full room, which included a few demo’s and of course mentioned the new VS Code extension for PostgreSQL, which has had over 225K downloads since it was first released back in May of this year. [Link to abstract]
- Ten Postgres Hacker Journeys—and what they teach us: This was my talk! The talk shares stories from Postgres hackers about how they became effective hackers. But the talk is not only for aspiring Postgres contributors—these stories are useful for application developers, DBAs, managers, data engineers… for all of us. [Link to abstract; link to slides]
- Unlocking Astronomical Breakthroughs: Postgres Sharding Strategies for Continuous Discovery: Joaquim Oliveira and Pilar de Teodoro co-presented this talk about their journey to migrate their terabytes of data from Greenplum to … something else. Spoiler: one of the candidates is Citus. [Link to abstract]
- Workload Fingerprints: A Key to Understanding PostgreSQL Performance: Luigi Nardi of DBtune delivered this talk about a new fingerprint method for performance tuning. [Link to abstract]
Overheard: Why do people go to PGConf NYC?
As I walked the hallway at PGConf NYC this year, I started asking people why they come to PGConf NYC—and what they think the attendees are getting out of the event. I’m sharing a few of the answers, since these perspectives just might inspire you to join us next year.
“When we started running Postgres conferences umpteen years ago, Postgres was used in production but wasn't considered for many mission critical workloads. It was early days, and Postgres was just beginning to emerge as a defacto open source relational database.
Fast forward 15 years, people now trust their critical production workloads to Postgres. And given that NYC is a center for commerce in the world, people come to PGConf NYC not just to learn more about the Postgres database technology, but also to figure out how to scale Postgres as their workloads grow.
There is something for everyone on the PGConf NYC schedule: people early in their journey as well as advanced experts. PGConf NYC operates in a unique place in the PG conference ecosystem because we’re willing to lean more into Postgres in practice, I sometimes call it “Practical Postgres and its Best Practices”. You might hear a commercial talk and that’s OK because so many people run their workloads in the cloud or on commercial implementations of Postgres.”
— Jonathan Katz, PostgreSQL committer, PostgreSQL core team member, PgUS Board member, PGCA board member, & co-organizer of PGConf NYC
“PGConf NYC is where I learn about the most interesting developments in the Postgres ecosystem each year—and how different companies are trying to solve common challenges. For example this year I learned more about Postgres 18 and asynchronous IO, which is going to be is a game changer in terms of how much performance gain you can see. Scaling Postgres is important to my organization and this conference gives me a lens into the future of what Postgres can do.”
— Senior Leader in the financial services industry
“I got involved in the Postgres community through attending Postgres OSS conferences. I met smart people there, and in fact I landed at my current role in the financial services industry through connections I made at PGConf NYC two years ago. I would describe myself as an engineer and "superuser" of Postgres—not as a Postgres hacker. For that reason I especially love this conference. Because PGConf NYC is so industry- and user-focused, I get to meet other advanced users like myself and take inspiration from how they are using Postgres—and learn about high-scale, industry-focused projects”
—Chelsea Dole, Senior Database Engineer in the financial services industry & member of Talk Selection Committee for PGConf NYC 2025
“Why come to PGConf NYC? To feed the Postgres contributors information about what your pain points are—and to talk to the people that make Postgres. To tell them what you love about it and what you hate about it. Plus there are lots of interesting, knowledgeable database people to meet in the hallways.”
—Andres Freund, PostgreSQL Committer, PostgreSQL core-team member, & Partner Engineer at Microsoft
“Anyone using a cloud database should come to PGConf NYC to hear how to use the database that the cloud vendors provide you. And to give voice-of-the-customer feedback to your cloud vendors in the hallways. I come to PGConf NYC because Postgres is what the cloud databases are downstream from. And PGConf NYC gives me the additional benefit of influencing the Postgres open source contributors—and learning what the source committers are prioritizing."
—Senior Leader in the financial services industry
“One of the things I like about PGConf NYC is there are speakers from different parts of the industry who bring a lot of interesting and new perspectives about Postgres. And discussions are happening all the time and everywhere in the hallways. It’s not just the same people talking to their old friends, instead spontaneous groups of attendees are forming, with new people in different constellations.”
—Magnus Hagander, President of the Board PostgreSQL Europe and Principal Database Consultant, Redpill Linpro
Gratitude for organizers, speakers, & sponsors
PGConf NYC would not have happened without all the volunteers on the operations and talk selection committees, nor without the many speakers who shared their expertise. And of course the attendees are the ones who made the hallways buzz with energy.
It also goes without saying that this conference wouldn’t have happened without funding from sponsors. Big shout-out to all the sponsors—including my employer, Microsoft, for being a Platinum sponsor.
I had a fabulous time and so did everyone I talked to.
Photo Gallery of some of the PGConf NYC speakers
I managed to capture some good photos of some of the PGConf NYC speakers as they took the stage, including (in alphabetical order) Andres Freund, Bohan Zhang from Open AI, Boriss Mejías of EDB, Chelsea Dole introducing the lightning talks, Divya Bhargov, Melanie Plageman, Jared Meade, Jonathan Katz introducing the lightning talks, Luigi Nardi, Magnus Hagander, Maxim Lukiyanov, Rob Treat, and Ryan Booz. There are also a few pics of me—I presented a talk about Postgres hacker journeys, and I also delivered the Microsoft sponsored keynote.
Photo Gallery of the PGConf NYC Vibes
Just a few more photos from PGConf NYC that didn’t fit into the “speaker gallery” nor into the “with Microsoft team” gallery. I loved Chelsea Dole’s “I heart PG” t-shirt. Of course I wanted to shine a light on the sponsors that made the conference possible. I think the Postgres necklace that Melanie was wearing was pretty awesome. And thanks to Jared Meade for capturing the “Times Square at night” photos that hint at the post-conference entertainment that is just a stones-throw away from the event in midtown Manhattan.
Photo Gallery with the Microsoft team at PGConf NYC
I feel so lucky to be part of the Postgres open source community—and I’m doubly lucky to work in the Postgres team at Microsoft. Hopefully these pics give you a feel for the energy and the buzz in the hallways at PGConf NYC, including around the Microsoft booth.
Microsoft