I arrived in the beautiful city of Prague on Tuesday evening to take part in Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day (P2D2) for the first time . Here are some impression this wonderful event left me with.
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The event started out with a speaker dinner,where I had the chance to enjoy a delicious meal and chat through the evening with Robert Haas, Esther Minano, Josef Machytka and Alfredo Rodriguez. I'm especially thankful to Josef, who had 3D-printed some beautiful elephants as gifts for the speakers!
After dinner, I headed back to the hotel to get rest for the upcoming eventful day. In the morning after a quick breakfast, it was time to make my way to the conference venue. Though it was a bit cold, the beautiful sunny morning walk towards the conference was quite refreshing. When I arrived, the place was already bustling with PostgreSQL people—a mix of familiar faces from other conferences and many new ones. I later learned that nearly 300 participants had registered for the event.
After registering and grabbing a coffee, it was time for the first talks. There were two tracks to choose from with so many great talks that it was hard to pick. I decided to start the day with Jan Suchánek’s talk on analytical functions in PostgreSQL. It was a practical introduction into window functions in SQL, explaining when and how to use them. The hands-on examples were neat to see.
The following talk I attended was “Advanced Performance Tuning in PostgreSQL” with Somdyuti Paul from Google. He shared insights on setting up PostgreSQL for best performance and robust operation, clearly based on his extensive experience with helping organisations run databases at scale.
Next up was Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek’s talk on the anatomy of table-level locks. Besides explaining different lock levels, she shared great tips on avoiding unnecessary locks and introduced best practices for schema migrations, including the expand-contract pattern and pgroll.
After a packed morning, it was time to replenish our energy with a buffet of Czech specialties. Lunch was also a great opportunity to catch up with Alexander Kukushkin and discuss the Kubernetes operator landscape with David Pech.
The afternoon session started with Esther Minano’s talk on replicating schema changes, followed by Bilge Ince’s session on integrating AI with PostgreSQL.
After a short coffee break, it was my turn to speak on "What PostgreSQL EXPLAIN Plans Do Not Explain." Despite diving into some pretty obscure technical aspects, the talk seemed to be well received.
The final sessions of the day included Josef Machytka’s insights on building data lakehouses and Alfredo Rodriguez’s overview of using pgEdge for asynchronous multi-master replication.
After the conference wrapped up, the venue was filled with people buzzing with new ideas and inspiration. The evening ended with a lively reception, where attendees continued chatting about PostgreSQL, technology, and life over drinks and snacks. Once the reception ended, a group of us headed to a nearby pub to enjoy some delicious local dishes before calling it a night.
With P2D2 over, it was time to get some much-needed rest before heading to FOSDEM PGDay the next day for my lightning talk.
I was pleasantly surprised by the scale and positive vibe of P2D2. The high level of local participation stood out to me, as I haven't seen such engagement in other cities.
Next year’s P2D2 is definitely going to be one of the top picks on my conference calendar.
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