PostgreSQL Meets AI at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 (T-3 weeks)
POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 is where that evolution comes into focus, please visit conference’s site to register and add the event to your calendar! Artificial intelligence is changing how we build applications, but not in the way many people expected. The hardest problems aren’t about writing the perfect prompt or choosing the “best” model. Once teams move past demos and start putting systems in front of real users, the pain shows up somewhere else: in the data layer. The recurring failure modes of production AI are remarkably consistent. Systems return answers that sound plausible but aren’t grounded. They pull the wrong records, miss key context, or stitch together fragments from unrelated sources. Sometimes they are correct, but wildly expensive. And when you let an AI system generate queries dynamically, the operational questions get sharper very quickly: what stops it from issuing a destructive statement, scanning a massive table, or repeatedly hammering a hot index until your p95 latency falls off a cliff? In other words, the hard part is not generation. The hard part is retrieval, how data is accessed, shaped, governed, and observed. That’s exactly why the AI track at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 is so compelling this year: it treats PostgreSQL not as a passive database at the end of a request, but as an active foundation for the next wave of AI, native applications. What’s emerging across the agenda is a new mental model. PostgreSQL, long trusted as a durable, transactional system, has become the place where “truth” lives for many applications. And as AI agents become the interface to those applications, Postgres increasingly becomes the retrieval backbone that keeps those agents honest. From queries to agents: when the database becomes a tool In traditional application design, we assume a deterministic relationship between intent and query. The application decides what it needs, SQL expresses it precisely, and the database returns a predictable result set. We tune the query, we add an index, we cache the hot path, and we move on. Agentic systems break that contract. An agent doesn’t just execute a query. It interprets intent, decides what tools to use, and often iterates, sometimes several times, based on intermediate results. That “tool use” framing is central to Pamela Fox’s session An MCP for your Postgres DB, which explores how MCP (Model Context Protocol) turns a database into an explicit, discoverable interface, one where design choices directly influence whether an LLM behaves safely and predictably when it interacts with Postgres. In parallel, Abe Omorogbe’s From Queries to Agents: The Next Era of Data Retrieval on PostgreSQL frames the evolution in a way that resonates with anyone building production systems: as agents move from demos to reality, the challenge isn’t the model, it’s “reliable, safe, and context, aware data retrieval.” In practice, that means dealing with failures that don’t show up in toy examples: agents producing SQL that’s syntactically valid but semantically wrong; pulling the right table but the wrong slice; or forming queries that quietly explode costs because there’s no natural “stop” condition. Once you accept that agents are going to query your system in ways you didn’t anticipate, PostgreSQL becomes part of your application’s safety boundary. It must handle unpredictable access patterns without falling over. It must protect you from unsafe operations, whether accidental or adversarial. And increasingly, it must support multi, modal retrieval, because the context an agent needs rarely lives in a single shape of data. That’s the pivot POSETTE: An Event For Postgres 2026 is capturing: the database is no longer just queried, it is increasingly negotiated with by AI systems. RAG in practice: why PostgreSQL keeps showing up Retrieval, Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the default architecture for serious AI applications. It’s a pragmatic response to a simple reality: models are good at language, but they aren’t systems of record. If you care about accuracy, freshness, or traceability, you retrieve relevant information first, then generate a response grounded in that retrieved context. The interesting question isn’t “does RAG work?”, it does. The interesting question is where teams choose to implement it. A growing number of teams are using PostgreSQL as the core retrieval substrate for RAG pipelines because it lets them keep the system cohesive. You can store structured records, join across metadata, filter and rank, and now, thanks to the ecosystem, incorporate vector similarity search without standing up a separate database whose contents need to be continuously synchronized. That’s the practical framing behind Julia Schröder Langhaeuser and Paula Santamaría’s session Production RAG at Scale with Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Their talk centers on what it takes to go from prototype to production, including architecture choices, performance tuning, and the operational discipline required when you’re serving RAG workloads at meaningful scale. The message is less “Postgres can do vectors” and more “RAG becomes real when you can observe it, tune it, and trust it.” This distinction matters, because the failure modes of RAG systems are rarely about embeddings. They are about context assembly. The best answer in the world is useless if the system retrieved the wrong snippets, missed an important constraint, or pulled stale policy text from last quarter. PostgreSQL’s value here is subtle but powerful: it gives you a place to combine retrieval signals, structured filters, semantic similarity, graph, like relationships, business rules, inside a system whose behavior you can reason about. The real problem is retrieval, not generation If you spend time around production AI teams, you start to hear the same phrase: retrieval is the hard part. Models can generate fluent text easily. But without high, quality input, and without guardrails around what the system is allowed to do, they generate confident nonsense, partial answers, and occasionally harmful advice. In the worst cases, they can become operational liabilities: issuing expensive queries repeatedly, pulling sensitive data into prompts, or creating “self, inflicted incidents” that look like outages but are really uncontrolled tool usage. That’s why POSETTE’s AI programming doesn’t just celebrate capability. It spends real time on safety and operational control. Building safety tooling for risk, free AI tuning of Postgres: Fast cars need fast brakes by Mohsin Ejaz captures this mindset perfectly. The title says what many teams learn too late: if you’re going to let an automated system tune or optimize database behavior, the safety net matters more than the accelerator. Guardrails, validation, monitoring, and rollback discipline aren’t “nice to have”, they’re the difference between a neat demo and a system you can run while you sleep. When you connect that back to the agent conversation, you get a coherent picture. Whether the system is generating queries, selecting tools, or attempting optimizations, the foundation of reliability is the same: controlled access, predictable performance, and strong observability. PostgreSQL contributes here not because it’s magical, but because it’s mature. It has deep access control primitives, transactional guarantees, and an ecosystem that has spent decades building operational muscle. The AI shift doesn’t eliminate those fundamentals, it makes them more important. The emerging retrieval stack: what sits between agents and data One of the most useful ways to interpret this year’s sessions is as the early shape of a new architectural layer: a retrieval stack that lives between AI agents and your data systems. This stack is not a single product. It’s a set of practices and components that make agent, to, data interactions safe and effective. It includes abstraction layers (like MCP, style tool interfaces), orchestration logic that can combine relational queries with vector similarity (and, increasingly, graph, aware traversal), context shaping that ranks and filters results into something a model can actually use, and governance controls that define what data may be accessed in which situations. What’s exciting about POSETTE: An Event For Postgres 2026 is that the agenda treats this as a real engineering problem, not a buzzword. Pamela Fox’s work on MCP surfaces the interface, design angle: when you expose Postgres as tools, the shape of those tools determines whether the agent behaves well. Abe Omorogbe’s framing pushes toward retrieval architectures that are robust by design rather than bespoke glue code. Julia Schröder Langhaeuser and Paula Santamaría bring the production perspective: what breaks at scale, and what you need to monitor. And Mohsin Ejaz anchors the safety story: the more automation you introduce, the more you need reliable brakes. That same story now extends all the way to the developer experience. In Matt McFarland’s session PostgreSQL Tooling Across AI Editors and Agents, the focus shifts from retrieval architecture inside applications to the environments where developers and AI assistants actually work. By showing how PostgreSQL capabilities such as connection management, query execution, schema analysis, plan inspection, and performance insights can be surfaced consistently across VS Code, Cursor, and the GitHub Copilot CLI through an MCP server, the session adds an important dimension to the overall AI track: if agents are going to become part of everyday software development, PostgreSQL tooling also needs to become agent-aware, portable, and usable wherever those workflows happen. It’s a practical reminder that the AI future of Postgres is not only about what runs in production, but also about how humans and AI systems collaborate around the database during development itself. Together, these sessions sketch a coherent future: PostgreSQL isn’t just where data sits. It’s becoming one of the engines that powers retrieval, first application design. Why this matters if you build real systems If you’re building applications today, this shift is not theoretical. It changes how you think about database design, performance tuning, security, and cost. You can’t assume query predictability anymore, because agents don’t behave like carefully written application code. You can’t treat access control as a static checklist, because prompts are leaky abstractions and tool use creates new attack surfaces. And you can’t ignore cost modeling, because AI, generated queries can be expensive in ways that traditional workloads rarely are, especially when they iterate. POSETTE: An Event For Postgres 2026 tackles these realities head, on. Not with hype, but with practical patterns, real failure modes, and the kind of engineering trade, offs you only learn when systems meet production constraints. What you’ll take away from the AI track at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres this year If there’s a single theme to keep in mind, it’s this: AI isn’t replacing databases. It’s forcing us to use them differently. The AI sessions at POSETTE: An Event For Postgres 2026 will help you build a clearer mental model of how agents interact with PostgreSQL, how RAG systems become production, ready, and what it means to design retrieval layers with safety and observability from day one. And, importantly, you’ll leave with a vocabulary for discussing these systems without hand, waving: where the risk is, where the cost is, and where the true engineering work lives. PostgreSQL’s flexibility and extensibility make it a natural foundation for this transition, but the real advantage will go to teams that treat retrieval as an engineering discipline, not an afterthought. At POSETTE, that transformation is on full display. A quick call to action POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 is a can’t, miss event for the PostgreSQL community. Register to get updates and save the livestream sessions you want to attend on your calendar.Ultimate Guide to POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, 2026 edition
POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 is back for its 5th year: free, virtual, and unapologetically all about Postgres. No travel budget required and no jet lag involved. Just your laptop, a decent internet connection, and curiosity. This year the POSETTE 2026 schedule has 4 livestreams (16-18 June) with 44 talks at ~25 minutes each—covering everything from query performance and partitioning to Postgres 19 features, extensions, and use cases. Which is awesome but also a bit of work to figure out which talks are for you. Hence this ultimate guide post. Every talk will land on YouTube afterward (un-gated, of course) so if you miss anything you care about, you can watch it later. But if you can catch a livestream in June, do it. That’s when the “virtual hallway track” happens on Discord—where you can ask the POSETTE speakers questions and compare notes with other attendees. Meeting other attendees who have the same weird Postgres problems you do can be reassuring somehow. And yes, there will be swag. This guide is your cheat sheet: I’ve categorized and tagged all 44 talks so you don’t have to read 44 abstracts back-to-back. In this post you'll get: “By the numbers” summary Map of the 44 talks 2 Keynote sessions 23 Postgres core talks 11 Postgres ecosystem talks 8 Azure Database talks Why participate on the virtual hallway track on Discord A big thank you to our amazing speakers Join us for POSETTE 2026 & mark your calendars Official POSETTE 2026 Trailer “By the numbers” summary for POSETTE 2026 Here’s a quick snapshot of what you need to know about POSETTE this year: 3 days 16-18 June 2026 4 livestreams In Americas & EMEA time zones but of course you can watch from anywhere 44 talks All free, all virtual 2 invited keynotes Driving Postgres forward at Microsoft (Livestream 1), and Postgres 19 Hackers Panel: What’s In, What’s Out, & What’s Next (Livestream 2) 25 minutes Average length per talk ~1100 minutes Total minutes in POSETTE 2026 talks 50 speakers POSETTE 2026 speakers include PostgreSQL hackers and contributors, users, application developers, PG community members, Azure engineers, & Azure customers 6 keynote speakers Affan Dar & Charles Feddersen (Livestream 1); and Álvaro Herrera, Heikki Linnakangas, Melanie Plageman, & Thomas Munro (Livestream 2) 19 countries Speakers reside in 19 different countries 23 companies Speakers hail from 23 different companies 17.6% CFP acceptance rate 42 talks selected from 238 submisssions 75% general Postgres talks 33 talks are not cloud-specific at all, they’re about the Postgres technology & ecosystem 25% Azure-related talks 11 of 44 talks feature Azure Database for PostgreSQL or Azure HorizonDB 1 organizing company Organized by the Postgres team at Microsoft, in partnership with AMD 17 languages Published talk videos will have captions available in 17 languages, including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Chinese Simplified & Chinese Traditional Map of the 44 talks To help you quickly navigate all 44 talks, here’s a map of the high-level categories and detailed topics. : A map of the POSETTE 2026 talks—high-level categories and detailed tags to help you find what you care about 2 Keynote sessions Affan Dar and Charles Feddersen lead the PostgreSQL engineering and product teams at Microsoft, In this keynote, they’ll walk through how Microsoft is contributing to Postgres, both upstream in the open source project and in the cloud database service they build on top of it. Driving Postgres forward at Microsoft, by Affan Dar & Charles Feddersen (Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure HorizonDB, VS Code, Dev tools, community, Postgres hacking, open source, PosetteConf, livestream-1) Want to understand how Postgres features get decided? This keynote panel with 4 PostgreSQL committers & hackers will peel back the curtain. You’ll hear what made it into Postgres 19, what didn’t (and why), and get a sneak peek into a few of the things in the oven for Postgres 20. Postgres 19 Hackers Panel: What’s In, What’s Out, & What’s Next, by Álvaro Herrera, Heikki Linnakangas, Melanie Plageman, & Thomas Munro (Postgres 19, Postgres hacking, panel, open source, collaboration, multithreading, livestream-2) 23 Postgres core talks Data Modeling JSON in PostgreSQL - evil data type or just needs to be tamed?, by Boriss Mejias (JSON, performance, data modeling, livestream-1) PostgreSQL Design Patterns, by Chris Ellis (data modeling, SQL, PG use cases, livestream-1) Graph Data Exploring property graphs with SQL/PGQ in PostgreSQL, by Ashutosh Bapat (SQL/PGQ, graph data, data modeling, Postgres 19, livestream-4) LISTEN/NOTIFY LISTEN Carefully: How NOTIFY Can Trip Up Your Database, by Jimmy Angelakos (LISTEN/NOTIFY, PG use cases, triggers, livestream-4) Performance Maintaining Large Tables in PostgreSQL, by Sarat Balijepalli (WAL, performance, scaling Postgres, vacuum, autovacuum, statistics, partitioning, monitoring, livestream-3) My Postgres partitioning cookbook, by Derk van Veen (partitioning, PG use cases, data modeling, performance, livestream-4) PostgreSQL 17 vs 18: Side‑by‑Side Performance Wins in Real‑World Queries, by Divya Bhargov (performance, PG use cases, livestream-3) Vacuuming Enhancements in PostgreSQL 18: Faster, Smarter, More Predictable, by Shashikant Shakya (vacuum, async IO, monitoring, performance, livestream-4) PG Internals Linux and PostgreSQL in the Multiverse of Connections, by Josef Machytka (Linux, PG internals, connection pooling, livestream-2) pg_stats: How Postgres Internal Stats Work, by Richard Yen (statistics, pg_stats, PG internals, query planner, livestream-2) Postgres isn’t slow, your storage is, by Sai Srirampur (storage, IO, performance, livestream-3) PostgreSQL queues done right with PgQ, by Alexander Kukushkin (queues, PG internals, extensions, livestream-2) random_page_cost in Postgres - why the default is 4.0 and should you lower it?, by Tomas Vondra (PG internals, IO, performance, livestream-1) The Wonderful World of WAL, by Bruce Momjian (WAL, PG internals, replication, livestream-3) What's new with constraints in Postgres 18, by Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek (constraints, data modeling, livestream-2) Postgres Hacking Fuzzing PostgreSQL, by Adam Wolk (PG internals, testing, Dev tools, libpq, security, livestream-1) Journey of developing a performance optimization feature in PostgreSQL, by Rahila Syed (Postgres hacking, PG internals, performance, WAL, replication, livestream-4) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to PostgreSQL Hacking: Don’t Panic, Just Start Small, by Xuneng Zhou (Postgres hacking, PG internals, community, livestream-2) Replication Past, Present, and Future: Logical Decoding and Replication in PostgreSQL, by Hari Kiran (replication, logical decoding, PG internals, livestream-4) Where Does My INSERT Go? A Logical Replication Story, by Hamid Akhtar (replication, PG internals, WAL, livestream-4) Security From Dev to Prod: Securing Postgres the Right Way, by Sakshi Nasha (security, roles, PG use cases, extensions, monitoring, livestream-4) From trust to Tokens: A Short History of PostgreSQL Authentication, by Murat Tuncer (authentication, security, livestream-2) PostgreSQL vs. SQL Server: Security Model Differences, by Taiob Ali (security, authentication, SQL Server, roles, livestream-1) 11 Postgres ecosystem talks Analytics pg_lake: Postgres as a lakehouse, by Marco Slot (pg_lake, extensions, OLAP, data warehouse, Iceberg, DuckDB, analytics, livestream-2) Apache AGE Querying & Visualizing Graphs in Postgres with Apache AGE, by Christian Miles (Apache AGE, graph data, data visualization, SQL/PGQ, Azure HorizonDB, livestream-1) Autotuning Building safety tooling for risk-free AI tuning of Postgres: Fast cars need fast brakes, by Mohsin Ejaz (autotuning, AI, performance, monitoring, livestream-2) Change Data Capture Building Event-Driven Systems with PostgreSQL Logical Replication and Drasi, by Diaa Radwan (Drasi, replication, WAL, CDC, livestream-3) Citus Move Less, Move Faster: Speeding Up Citus Cluster Scaling, by Muhammad Usama (Citus, extensions, performance, scaling Postgres, livestream-4) Dev Tools An MCP for your Postgres DB, by Pamela Fox (MCP, AI, Python, Dev tools, livestream-1) pgcov: Bringing Real Test Coverage to PostgreSQL Code, by Pavlo Golub (testing, Postgres hacking, Dev tools, extensions, CI/CD, livestream-3) PostgreSQL Tooling Across AI Editors and Agents, by Matt McFarland (Dev tools, VS Code, Cursor, AI, data visualization, Apache AGE, graph data, Azure, MCP, Copilot, livestream-1) Django PostgreSQL Generated Columns by Example, by Paolo Melchiorre (app dev, Django, generated columns, livestream-2) Kubernetes Quorum-Based Consistency for Cluster Changes with CloudNativePG Operator, by Jeremy Schneider & Leonardo Cecchi (CloudNativePG, Kubernetes, PG use cases, livestream-3) Performance Modelling Postgres Performance Degradation on Burstable Cloud Instances, by Chun Lin Goh (performance, burstable, compute, QA, livestream-4) 8 Azure Database for PostgreSQL & Azure HorizonDB talks AI-related talks From Queries to Agents: The Next Era of Data Retrieval on PostgreSQL, by Abe Omorogbe (AI, MCP, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, graph data, Apache AGE, Azure HorizonDB, livestream-3) Production RAG at Scale with Azure Database for PostgreSQL, by Julia Schröder Langhaeuser & Paula Santamaría (Azure Database for PostgreSQL, AI, RAG, PG use cases, livestream-3) AMD Choose the Right Azure Infrastructure to Improve Postgres Performance by Over 60%, by Andrew Ruffin (AMD, performance, Azure, compute, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, livestream-1) Azure HorizonDB Why we built Azure HorizonDB for PostgreSQL, by Dingding Lu (Azure HorizonDB, scaling Postgres, livestream-3) Flexible Server pg_duckdb in Action: Accelerating Analytics on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, by Nitin Jadhav (DuckDB, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, extensions, OLAP, analytics, performance, livestream-4) The Rise of PostgreSQL as the Everything Database, by Varun Dhawan (Postgres history, extensions, graph data, Apache AGE, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, DuckDB, Citus, livestream-3) What I’ve Learned Teaching Postgres to 200+ field engineers at Microsoft, by Paula Berenguel (training, Azure, Postgres skilling, livestream-1) Oracle to Postgres Migrating VLDBs from Oracle to Azure Database for PostgreSQL, by Adithya Kumaranchath (migration, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Oracle to Postgres, livestream-2) Why participate in the virtual hallway track on Discord If you’ve checked out the schedule and plan to watch some of the talks, you might still be wondering: why join live—and why bother with the virtual hallway track on Discord? Here’s how a few of last year’s attendees described the experience: “Very impressed by all the speakers and content I am absolutely shattered as there was so much great content in all the talks over the past 3 days but I have probably learnt more in these sessions than I could have in months of reading up.” “Want to let y’all know how much I got from this onine conference, the speakers were excellent, well-prepared and well-presented. The hosts were informative, engaging, & amusing. The discord hallway channel made me feel connected. I learned a lot and found some new inspiration. I’ll be back next year!” “I have no idea how I’m going to summarise all the interesting stuff for coworkers.” The common thread: the live, shared experience—being able to ask questions, compare notes, and learn alongside other people in real time. How to join the virtual hallway track Head to the #posetteconf channel on Discord (on the Microsoft Open Source Discord) That’s where speakers and attendees hang out during the livestreams—it’s where you can ask questions, share reactions, and just say hi Big thank you to our amazing speakers Every great event starts with great talks—and great talks start with great speakers. Want to learn more about the people behind these talks? Visit the POSETTE 2026 Speaker page Click a speaker’s bio to see their written interview (if available) If a speaker has been a guest on the Talking Postgres podcast in the past, then you’ll find a link to their episode there, too Join us for POSETTE 2026! Mark your calendars I hope you join us for POSETTE 2026. Consider yourself officially invited. As part of the talk selection team, I’m definitely biased—but I truly believe these speakers and talks are worth your time. I’ll be hosting Livestream 1 and you’ll find me in the #posetteconf Discord chat. I hope to see you there. And please: tell your Postgres friends, so they don’t miss out! 🗓️ Add the livestreams to your calendar Livestream 1: Tue 16 June, 8am–2pm PDT (UTC-7) [ register for updates ] and/or [ add to calendar ] Livestream 2: Wed 17 June, 8am–2pm CEST (UTC+2) [ register for updates ] and/or [ add to calendar ] Livestream 3: Wed 17 June, 8am–2pm PDT (UTC-7) [ register for updates ] and/or [ add to calendar ] Livestream 4: Thu 18 June, 8am–2pm CEST (UTC+2) [ register for updates ] and/or [ add to calendar ] Watch last year’s POSETTE 2025 talks in advance: And if you want to get ready, you can watch talks from the POSETTE 2025 playlist on YouTube anytime, anywhere. Lots of solid, useful, and evergreen Postgres talks in there. “Official Trailer” for POSETTE 2026 is on YouTube To help more developers, community members, and Postgres users discover POSETTE 2026, our team created this short video trailer. Take a peek and share it with friends as an invitation of sorts. We’re trying to make sure that people don’t miss their opportunity to be part of the livestreams and ask questions on the discord during the conference (as well as watch the talks on YouTube after the event is over.) Watch and share the trailer: Official Trailer for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 Acknowledgements & Gratitude I’ve already thanked the 50 amazing speakers above. In addition, thanks go to Silvano Coriani, Cornelia Biacsics, Aaron Wislang, and My Nguyen for reviewing parts of this post before publication. I also want to thank the team at AMD for their partnership and support of POSETTE this year! And of course, big thank you to the POSETTE 2026 organizing team and POSETTE talk selection team—without you, there would be no POSETTE! Figure 3: Visual invitation to join the virtual hallway track for POSETTE 2026 on the Microsoft Open Source Discord, so you can chat with the speakers & others in the Postgres communityPostgres speakers - POSETTE 2026 CFP is closing soon!
Guidelines for submitting a proposal to the POSETTE CFP POSETTE: An Event for Postgres is back for its 5th year, and the excitement is already building. Scheduled for June 16 – June 18, 2026, this free and virtual developer event brings together the global Postgres community for three days of learning, sharing, and deep technical storytelling. Whether you're a first-time speaker or a seasoned contributor, your story matters and the Call for Proposals (CFP) closes on February 1, 2026. If you’re considering submitting a proposal (or encouraging someone else to), in this post I will walk you through everything you need to know to craft a strong, compelling submission before the deadline arrives. 1. Key Dates to Know CFP Deadline: February 1, 2026 @ 11:59 PM PST Talk Acceptance Notifications: February 11, 2026 Event Dates: June 16 – June 18, 2026 (includes four unique livestreams, live text chat, and speaker Q&A) Schedule & sessions announced: Feb 25, 2026 Pre-record all talks: Weeks of April 20 & April 27 Tip: Add a calendar reminder, this deadline arrives quickly, and no late submissions are accepted. 2. Why Submit a Talk to POSETTE? Submitting a talk for a conference can seem like a difficult task at the start, but this guide can help you come up with potential ideas that can be used to submit a talk for the conference. Share your story with the global Postgres community Your experience, whether it’s a deep dive into query planning, a migration journey, or lessons learned from scaling can help thousands of developers. Grow your professional visibility POSETTE is a high‑reach, virtual event that enables your content to live on well after the livestream. First‑time speakers are welcomed and encouraged POSETTE is not an exclusive club. If you have a story to tell, this is a supportive, welcoming place to tell it. 3. What Makes a Strong Proposal? First‑time speaker? Don’t worry. The guidelines below cover the key elements you’ll need to craft a strong, successful proposal. Make your proposal focused, not broad: Many proposals try to cover too much. The strongest ones zoom in on a specific challenge, insight, or transformation. A narrow, well‑defined topic reads more clearly and creates a stronger takeaway for attendees. Clearly identify the target audience: State who the talk is for: Beginner Postgres developers Cloud architects DBAs focusing on performance Engineers migrating from Oracle/MySQL This helps the selection team understand fit and event balance. Demonstrate real‑world value, not generic theory: Talks rooted in hands‑on experience tend to perform best. Strong abstracts answer: What problem did we face? What did we try? What worked (or didn’t)? What can you replicate in your environment? POSETTE audiences love actionable content. 4. Show how attendees will grow from your talk: Selection committees love when speakers articulate transformation. Clarify what people will gain: “Improve query execution time by…” “Avoid common replication pitfalls…” “Design HA setups more confidently…” The reviewers want talks with practical outcomes. 5. Highlight what makes your talk unique Is your approach unconventional? Did you migrate at massive scale? Did you build or extend an OSS tool? Did you learn something the hard way? Emphasize novelty POSETTE gets many submissions, so originality matters. 6. Use a storytelling angle: Human brains love stories. Strong abstracts often follow a mini narrative: Problem Tension Turning point Solution Lessons This makes your proposal memorable and relatable. 7. Keep the abstract concise and structured: Avoid long, meandering paragraphs. A clear structure like this works well: Topic summary (one sentence) Problem + context (two–three sentences) Solution or insights (two–three sentences) What attendees will learn (one–two sentences) 4. Ideas for Topics That Work Well Not every proposal needs to be a deep internal dive real‑world stories resonate. Consider topics like: Migrating to Postgres (cloud or on‑prem) Performance tuning adventures and lessons Postgres extensions and ecosystem tooling Operational best practices, HA architecture, or incident learnings Developer productivity with Postgres Novel patterns or creative uses of Postgres internals Azure Database for PostgreSQL customer stories Community‑focused topics, such as how to start a PGDay event, how to begin contributing to open source, or how to engage with the Postgres community effectively. Look at POSETTE 2024 or 2025 talk titles to calibrate tone and depth. 5. What Happens If Your Talk Is Accepted? Good news: the speaker experience is designed to be smooth and supportive. Talks are 25 minutes long and pre‑recorded, with professional production support from the POSETTE organizing team at an agreed-upon time during the weeks of April 20 & April 27 Speakers join live text chat during the session to interact with attendees No travel required the event is fully virtual All you need is a good microphone, a quiet space, and a story worth telling. 6. How to Submit Your Proposal Here are the official links you’ll want handy: 📄 CFP Page: https://posetteconf.com/2026/cfp/ ❓ FAQ: https://posetteconf.com/2026/faq/ 📝 Submit on Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/posette2026/ Submission Checklist Before hitting "submit," make sure you have: A strong, interesting title A clear and concise abstract Defined takeaways for attendees An understanding of your target audience Submission completed before Feb 1 @ 11:59 PM PST POSETTE is built by and for the Postgres community and your experience, whether small or monumental, has the potential to help others. With the CFP deadline approaching fast on February 1, now is the perfect time to refine your idea, shape your abstract, and submit your talk. This could be the year your story gets shared with thousands. Take the leap the community will be glad you did.Scaling PostgreSQL at OpenAI: Lessons in Reliability, Efficiency, and Innovation
At POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025, Bohan Zhang of OpenAI delivered a compelling talk on how OpenAI has scaled Azure Database for PostgreSQL- Flexible Server to meet the demands of one of the world’s most advanced AI platforms running at planetary scale. The Postgres team at Microsoft has partnered deeply with OpenAI for years to enhance the service to meet their performance, scale, and availability requirements, and it is great to see how OpenAI is now deploying and depending on Flexible Server as a core component of ChatGPT. Hearing firsthand about their challenges and breakthroughs is a reminder of what’s possible when innovation meets real-world needs. This blog post captures the key insights from Bohan’s POSETTE talk, paired with how Azure’s cloud platform supports innovation at scale. PostgreSQL at the Heart of OpenAI As Bohan shared during his talk, PostgreSQL is the backbone of OpenAI’s most critical systems. Because PostgreSQL plays a critical role in powering services like ChatGPT, Open AI has prioritized making it more resilient and scalable to avoid any disruptions. That’s why OpenAI has invested deeply in optimizing PostgreSQL for reliability and scale. Why Azure Database for PostgreSQL? OpenAI has long operated PostgreSQL on Azure, initially using a single primary instance without sharding. This architecture worked well—until write scalability limits emerged. Azure’s managed PostgreSQL service provides the flexibility to scale read replicas, optimize performance, and maintain high availability to provide global low latency reads without the burden of managing infrastructure. This is why we designed Azure Database for PostgreSQL to support precisely these kinds of high-scale, mission-critical workloads, and OpenAI’s use case is a powerful validation of that vision. Tackling Write Bottlenecks PostgreSQL’s MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control) design presents challenges for write-heavy workloads—such as index bloat, autovacuum tuning complexity, and version churn. OpenAI addressed this by: Reducing unnecessary writes at the application level Using lazy writes and controlled backfills to smooth spikes Migrating extreme write-heavy workloads with natural sharding keys to other systems. These strategies allowed OpenAI to preserve PostgreSQL’s strengths while mitigating its limitations. Optimizing Read-Heavy Workloads With writes offloaded, OpenAI focused on scaling read-heavy workloads. Key optimizations included: Offloading read queries to replicas Avoiding long-running queries and expensive multi-way join queries Using PgBouncer for connection pooling, reducing latency from 50ms to under 5ms Categorizing requests by priority and assigning dedicated read replicas to high-priority traffic As Bohan noted, “After all the optimization we did, we are super happy with Postgres right now for our read-heavy workloads.” Schema Governance and Resilience OpenAI also implemented strict schema governance to avoid full table rewrites and production disruptions. Only lightweight schema changes are allowed, and long-running queries are monitored to prevent them from blocking migrations. To ensure resilience, we categorized requests by priority and implemented multi-level rate limiting—at the application, connection, and query digest levels. This helped prevent resource exhaustion and service degradation. Takeaway OpenAI’s journey is a masterclass in how to operate PostgreSQL at hyper-scale. By offloading writes, scaling read replicas, and enforcing strict schema governance, OpenAI demonstrated PostgreSQL on Azure meets the demands of cutting-edge AI systems. It also reinforces the value of Azure’s managed database services in enabling teams to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. We’re proud of the work we’ve done to co-innovate with OpenAI and excited to see how other organizations can apply these lessons to their own PostgreSQL deployments. Check out the on-demand talk “Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI” and many more PostgreSQL community sessions from POSETTE.POSETTE - What’s New with Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server in 2025 🆕
Talk Recap I had the opportunity to present at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025, where I shared what’s new with Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server. The session covers: Recent feature updates in performance, storage, and compute New AI-ready extensions like AZURE_AI, DISKANN, and PGVECTOR Improvements in high availability, GeoDR, and major version upgrades Enterprise-grade security enhancements (CMK, Entra ID) Tuning & monitoring improvements to simplify day-to-day operations 🎥 Watch the talk here: https://youtu.be/GnA8Z1Ojnk0?si=r1dbJb57JKjTGl68 Would love your feedback—and happy to answer any follow-up questions in this thread!Calling Postgres speakers, POSETTE CFP is open until Apr 7th 2024
Call for Proposals (CFP) is open til Sun Apr 7 at 11:59pm PDT for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, a free & virtual event. What’s your Postgres story? We’d love to see your talk proposal, whether you’re a first-time speaker, a regular on the Postgres conference circuit, or somewhere in between.
