FIT CTU co-organized the fifteenth year of the Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day (P2D2) conference. The event offered workshops and lectures on the relational and open-source PostgreSQL database system. The main topics included PostgreSQL news, experiences with PostgreSQL operation in exposed applications and extending its infrastructure or functionality. The event took place on 31 Jan. – 1 Feb. 2023 at FIT CTU.
Almost 300 conference visitors had the opportunity to attend eight lectures and four workshops on the PostgreSQL system. PostgreSQL is a full-featured, open-source relational database system. It has over twenty years of active development and has an excellent reputation for reliability and security. The P2D2 conference, dedicated to the PostgreSQL database, is organized under the auspices of the Czech and Slovak PostgreSQL User Group (CSPUG).
The lectures were oriented on the news in PostgreSQL itself, e.g. the MERGE command, which is a SQL command for inserting a record into a table. The lecturers also talked about query processing optimization and shared their experiences with PostgreSQL operation in exposed applications, now also from the government sector. The expansion of PostgreSQL infrastructure and functionality was also a big topic. The topics of the workshops were, for example, logical replication, reading execution plans or advanced work with the psql text client and the specialized pspg pager.
The conference was attended by experts directly and long-term involved in developing the PostgreSQL core itself. Among the lecturers were, for example, Álvaro Herrera and Peter Zaitsev, who is also prominent figure in the MySQL database management system community. Vítězslav Košina, a software architect, introduced the audience to the issue of developing applications for the State Institute for Drug Control.
“The atmosphere was great and typical for a proper developer conference. There was a lot of talk behind the scenes about technology and not much about sales and marketing. It is nice to hear real-life stories that PostgreSQL can be better than NoSQL solutions on projects, that ORM deployments do not always meet expectations and that developers, especially those close to databases, are still required, even in practice, to understand database schema normalization,” Michal Valenta, Ph.D., head of the Department of Software Engineering at FIT CTU and one of the organizers of the event, said about the conference.
