Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

Did you know that sometimes the fastest way of doing something is not having to do it at all? In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres, Michael Christofides joins Claire Giordano to chat about his journey to explaining explain (or should we say EXPLAIN!?) Michael shared his origin story as a mathematician and his first experience with Postgres before walking us through co-founding a Postgres company and now co-hosting a podcast. Like many in the Postgres community, he is opinionated in the best way possible! We even learned about his passion for BUFFERS and why he believes everyone should use them. This session also dives into Michael’s belief in the importance of Postgres documentation. Because great documentation can be worth its weight in Gold, especially when the going gets tough.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Schedule for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024
• Michael Christofides' company, pgMustard
• Blog: Where our name came from by Michael Christofides
• Wiki: Using EXPLAIN 
• X: Nikolay Samokhvalov
• Video: Lightning Talks at pgDay Paris 2024
• Blog: What’s new with Postgres at Microsoft (August 2023) by Claire Giordano
• Blog: Faster PostgreSQL Counting by Joe Nelson
• GitHub: pg_docs_bot (browser extension)
• GitHub Docs: About GitHub Copilot Chat
• Documentation: Using EXPLAIN
• Glossary: EXPLAIN Glossary by Michael Christofides
• Video: EXPLAIN Explained by Josh Berkus
• Blog: Reading a Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE Query Plan by Caleb Hearth
• Blog: Explaining the unexplainable by Depesz
• PostgreSQL execution plan visualizer, explain.dalibo.com
• Blog: Planet PostgreSQL
• News: Postgres Weekly
• Playlist: 5mins of Postgres
• Podcast: Postgres FM podcast
• Cal invite for next Ep16 of Path To Citus Con podcast with Aaron Wislang & Teresa Giacomini

You have to find what works for you and Chris Ellis has never been the kind of person that could go and sit in a library—for Chris, the most productive Postgres place is in a coffee shop. In this episode of the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres, Chris Ellis joined Claire and Pino to chat about his path to becoming more (and more) expert at using PostgreSQL. Curiosity may have killed the cat but it’s taken Chris places, beginning as a 5 year old playing with QBASIC. Chris shared his journey to becoming a developer, an electronic engineer, a builder, and a PostgreSQL user. This session also delves into Chris’s work as a Postgres conference speaker (and organizer!) Importantly, we spent time remembering Simon Riggs, Postgres leader extraordinaire. RIP.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Chris's first thread on the PostgreSQL mailing lists
• Slides: IoT with PostgreSQL—by Chris Ellis at PGConf.EU 2023
• Slides: Advantage PostgreSQL—by Chris Ellis at Nordic PGDay 2024 
• Video: Should I use JSON in PostgreSQL?—by Boriss Mejías at PGConf.EU 2023 
• Slides: Fighting the Butterflies & giving your first Postgres conference talk—by Claire Giordano at pgDay Paris 2024 
• Markus Winand's website, Modern SQL
• Wikipedia: Linus’s law
• Andres Freund’s xz backdoor discovery
• Andres Freund’s Mastodon Toot about xz backdoor
• Podcast: Path to Citus Con Ep08: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas
• Podcast: Path To Citus Con Ep11: My Journey into Performance Benchmarking with Jelte Fennema-Nio & Marco Slot
• Podcast: Oxide and Friends next episode on Mon Apr 08 2024, featuring Andres Freund from Microsoft
• Jessie Frazelle tweet on LLM
• Video of pgDay Paris 2024 lightning talks, including Chris's "Electric Elephants" talk
• Post about Simon Riggs's tragic passing last week. He will be missed, he is missed, and many are heartbroken 
• Simon Riggs: The Next 20 Years—keynote at PGConf.EU 2023
• Book: The Art of PostgreSQL by Dimitri Fontaine
• Podcast: Path To Citus Con Ep09: Solving every data problem in SQL w/Dimitri Fontaine & Vik Fearing
• Blog: Planet PostgreSQL
• Blog: Contributing to Postgres 101: A Beginner's Experience by Elizabeth Christensen 
• Book: Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love 
• Chris Ellis’s LED PCB Art
• Blog: pgDay Paris – Postgres Community, cheese and wine by Boriss Mejías
• Podcast: LUG Radio
• CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres (free & virtual event) open until Sunday April 7th 2024 at 11:59pm PDT
• Cal invite for next Ep15 of Path To Citus Con podcast with Michael Christofides

Everywhere you look, people are talking about AI. From Copilot to ChatGPT to Postgres’s powerful AI capabilities (think: pgvector), AI is everywhere. In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, for developers who love Postgres, Arda Aytekin joined Claire and Pino to chat about spinning up on Postgres and AI. Arda shared his origin story in mechanical engineering and data science before walking us through vector databases, pgvector, and azure_ai. Arda is one of the creators of the azure_ai extension, so the conversation delves into the azure_ai integration between Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure AI Services. Also discussed (of course) was—Responsible AI.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode:

• pgvector on GitHub: https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector
• Andrew Kane: https://github.com/ankane
• Simon Willison’s Blog: https://simonwillison.net/
• Demo of Azure AI & pgvector with Azure Database for PostgreSQL by Claire Giordano: https://youtu.be/em0PKDGzzlQ?si=TrOQHXO5gqIuGsU0
• Blog: Introducing the azure_ai extension to Azure Database for PostgreSQL by Denzil Ribeiro: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/introducing-the-azure-ai-extension-to-azure-database-for/ba-p/3980291
• Documentation: Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server Azure AI Extension: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/postgresql/flexible-server/generative-ai-azure-overview
• Blog: Vectors are the new JSON in PostgreSQL by Jonathan Katz: https://jkatz05.com/post/postgres/vectors-json-postgresql/
• Responsible AI at Microsoft: https://aka.ms/rai
• Andreessen's Corollary: Ethical Dilemmas in Software Engineering by Bryan Cantrill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wtvQZijPzg
• Blog: Phi-2: The surprising power of small language models by Mojan Javaheripi & Sébastien Bubeck: https://www.microsoft.com/research/blog/phi-2-the-surprising-power-of-small-language-models/
• pg_vectorize: https://github.com/tembo-io/pg_vectorize
• OpenAI API documentation: https://platform.openai.com/docs/introduction
• Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals: Generative AI - Training: https://learn.microsoft.com/training/paths/introduction-generative-ai/
• ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers: https://www.deeplearning.ai/short-courses/chatgpt-prompt-engineering-for-developers/
• Andrej Karpathy's keynote @ Microsoft Build 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZQun8Y4L2A
• Stanford University CS231n: Deep Learning for Computer Vision: http://cs231n.stanford.edu/
• LangChain: https://www.langchain.com/
• Towards Data Science: https://towardsdatascience.com/
• Generative AI for Beginners on GitHub: https://github.com/microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners/
• Zero-shot learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-shot_learning
• Andrej Karpathy thread on LLMs: https://www.threads.net/@karpathy/post/C3lBSlov1QJ/
• Podcast: Path to Citus Con Ep01: Working in public on open source with Simon Willison & Marco Slot: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/working-in-public-on-open-source
• The Art of PostgreSQL by Dimitri Fontaine, get 15% OFF with CLAIRE15: https://theartofpostgresql.com/
• Podcast: Path to Citus Con Ep08: Solving every data problem in SQL w/Dimitri Fontaine & Vik Fearing: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/solving-every-data-problem-in-sql-w-dimitri-fontaine-vik-fearing)
• Arda Aytekin’s scheduled talk at PGDay Chicago 2024 on April 26: https://postgresql.us/events/pgdaychicago2024/schedule/session/1542-learnings-from-extension-development-in-rust-pgrx/ 
• CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres (free & virtual event) open until April 7th 2024: https://aka.ms/posette-cfp-2024

The best days are when things don’t go as planned. Derk van Veen joined Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on this episode of Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss his journey from Java developer to PostgreSQL specialist and DBA. From his first days with DB2 and Oracle, to his work with Postgres, Derk shared how he learned about databases. And how a very smart colleague would break the database on purpose, to give Derk the tough job of fixing it. Another topic: what to do when you need to jump on a problem but your heart rate doubles? What will it take to get that magical feeling of fixing something in the database? And a segue into sharing your expertise as a speaker at Postgres conferences. Because it’s always about the why.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Explaining the PostgreSQL concurrency control mechanisms by Derk van Veen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkxwaN46K88
• Podcast: Path to Citus Con Ep03: Why give talks at Postgres conferences with Álvaro Herrera & Boriss Mejías: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/why-giving-talks-at-postgres-conferences-matters
• Blog: A Deep Dive into Table Partitioning part 3 by Derk van Veen & Cosmin Octavian Pene: https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/maintenance-under-pressure
• Book: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King: https://stephenking.com/works/nonfiction/on-writing-a-memoir-of-the-craft.html
• PechaKucha, 20 slides for 20 seconds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PechaKucha
• pgChess: PostgreSQL 9.1+ extension for the game of Chess on GitHub: https://github.com/gciolli/pgChess
• FOSDEM PGDay 2023 talk by Derk van Veen: Fighting Write Amplification By Stimulating Hot Updates Through The Fill Factor: https://www.postgresql.eu/events/fosdem2023/schedule/session/4196-fighting-write-amplification-by-stimulating-hot-updates-through-the-fill-factor/
• Blog: Fighting PostgreSQL write amplification with HOT updates by Derk van Veen & Dave Pitts: https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/postgresql-hot-updates
• FOSDEM PGDay 2024 talk by Derk van Veen & Boriss Mejías: High Available Configurations Are Very Common For Postgresql. But How Do You Investigate Performance Problems When The Standby Can't Keep Up?
  https://www.postgresql.eu/events/fosdem2024/schedule/session/5164-high-available-configurations-are-very-common-for-postgresql-but-how-do-you-investigate-performance-problems-when-the-standby-cant-keep-up/
• FOSDEM PGDay 2024 slides by Derk van Veen & Boriss Mejías: High Available Configurations Are Very Common For Postgresql. But How Do You Investigate Performance Problems When The Standby Can't Keep Up?
  https://www.postgresql.eu/events/fosdem2024/sessions/session/5164/slides/460/HA_delay_analysis.pdf
• X post with picture about Derk and Boriss’ talk on FOSDEM PGDay 2024 by Devrim Gündüz: https://twitter.com/DevrimGunduz/status/1753348159026130959?s=20
• Blitz Chess game: https://www.chess.com/terms/blitz-chess
• CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres (free & virtual event) open until April 7th 2024: https://aka.ms/posette-cfp-2024 

No one likes benchmarking. But it can be one of the highest impact things you do. Jelte Fennema-Nio and Marco Slot joined Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on this episode of Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss their journeys into performance benchmarking. And how it can change the course of your career. Do you need to find bottlenecks in your Postgres? Do you want to build skills with database benchmarks? There are many lovely benchmarking tools in the Postgres world: HammerDB, pgbench, YCSB, BenchBase, perf, & more. And in addition to running benchmarks themselves—asking the right questions, introspection, and profiling matter just as much.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Podcast: Path To Citus Con Ep01: Working in public on open source with Simon Willison & Marco Slot: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/working-in-public-on-open-source
• Streetlight effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
• BenchBase: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/projects/benchbase/
• HammerDB: https://www.hammerdb.com/
• Slides: Intro to benchmarking with pgbench at PGConf NYC 2023 by Melanie Plageman: https://speakerdeck.com/melanieplageman/intro-to-benchmarking-with-pgbench
• Locust: https://locust.io/
• Blog post: How to benchmark performance of Citus and Postgres with HammerDB on Azure by Jelte Fennema-Nio: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2022/03/12/how-to-benchmark-performance-of-citus-and-postgres-with-hammerdb/
• Profiling with perf: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Profiling_with_perf
• Flame Graphs: https://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html
• Brendan Gregg’s Website, a super-valuable resource for performance engineering: https://www.brendangregg.com/overview.html
• Video: Analyzing Postgres performance problems using perf and eBPF by Andres Freund: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HghP4D72Noc
• Video: Explanatory talk about compiler optimization and memory & caches by Matt Godbolt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_smHyqgDTU&t=52s
• Compiler Explorer is fantastic, especially if you want to know how different compilers will optimize your code: https://godbolt.org/
• Mark Callaghan Twitter account @MarkCallaghanDB: https://twitter.com/MarkCallaghanDB
• PGConf.dev CFP is open until Mon Jan 15 2024 at 11:59pm PST: https://2024.pgconf.dev/cfp/
• 3rd party performance benchmark in 2023 by GigaOM on Transaction Processing & Price-Performance Testing of Distributed SQL Databases:  https://gigaom.com/report/transaction-processing-price-performance-testing/
• Blog post: "Query from any node" feature for Citus, by Marco Slot: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2022/06/17/citus-11-goes-fully-open-source/

Do you monitor your Postgres error logs for gold? Lukas Fittl and Rob Treat join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss their respective journeys into Postgres monitoring. Have you ever asked yourself: “Why is my query so slow?” Or had to figure out which query is slowing things down? Or why your database server is at 90% CPU? There are so many ways to monitor Postgres: pganalyze, pgMustard, pgBadger, pgDash, your cloud provider’s Query Performance Insights, pg_stat_statements, pg_stat_io, & more. If you’re running Postgres on a managed service, what kinds of things do you need to monitor & optimize for (vs. what will your cloud service provider do)? There’s also a segue on monitoring vs. observability: what’s the difference? 

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode:

• OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/
• pganalyze: https://pganalyze.com/
• pgDash: https://pgdash.io/
• pgMustard: https://www.pgmustard.com/
• pg_stat_statements docs: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgstatstatements.html
• pg_hint_plan: https://github.com/ossc-db/pg_hint_plan 
• pg_hint_plan hint list: https://github.com/ossc-db/pg_hint_plan/blob/master/docs/hint_list.md
• Example for PostgreSQL with pg_hint_plan: https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/QueryMethods.html#method-i-optimizer_hints
• 5mins of Postgres by pganalyze: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhqxwIAgz78HZhWyu3UyKrCWNk7VWjVpj
• Monitoring page on PostgreSQL wiki: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Monitoring
• PgHero GitHub repo: https://github.com/ankane/pghero
• Insights on pgBadger: A PGSQL Phriday #010 Recap: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/community-insights-on-pgbadger-a-pgsql-phriday-010-recap/ba-p/3880911
• Get PostgreSQL Logs Into Honeycomb: https://docs.honeycomb.io/getting-data-in/logs/postgresql/
• Blog post by Lukas Fittl about pg_stat_io by Lukas: https://pganalyze.com/blog/pg-stat-io
• Blog post by Andrew Atkinson about pg_stat_io: https://andyatkinson.com/blog/2023/11/01/PostgreSQL-IO-Visibility-wehack-pg_stat_io
• BPFtrace by iovisor GitHub repo: https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace
• Trace PostgreSQL locks with pg_lock_tracer: https://jnidzwetzki.github.io/2023/01/11/trace-postgresql-locks-with-pg-lock-tracer.html
• sysdig by draios GitHub repo: https://github.com/draios/sysdig
• Using BPFtrace to trace PostgreSQL vacuum operations: https://www.timescale.com/blog/using-bpftrace-to-trace-postgresql-vacuum-operations/
• PostgreSQL Mailing Lists: https://www.postgresql.org/list/
• psql — PostgreSQL interactive terminal: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-psql.html
• Ongoing discussion thread about pg_stat_statements: https://commitfest.postgresql.org/46/2837/
• Reconnoiter project referenced by Rob: https://github.com/circonus-labs/reconnoiter/tree/master/sql
• Funny tweet about PostgreSQL pronunciation: https://twitter.com/as_w/status/1648373353214885892
• O11ycast EP63 with Lukas Fittl: https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/o11ycast/ep-63-observability-in-the-database-with-lukas-fittl-of-pganalyze
• Oxide and Friends podcast: https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/

Is being lazy a good reason to learn SQL? Dimitri Fontaine and Vik Fearing join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss whether every data problem can be (or should be) solved in SQL. Have you tried to solve all the Advent of Code puzzles with SQL? Or written a book for application developers about The Art of PostgreSQL? Or tried to solve a murder mystery by running SQL queries? Regardless of whether you pronounce SQL as “sequel” or as “ess-cue-ell”, getting skilled at SQL is like going to the gym for exercise. It’s ideal to do it every day to build up your strength. Also, this episode includes an explanation of what a “declarative” language like SQL is—plus a fun segue into time zones.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:

• Dimitri Fontaine’s blog: https://tapoueh.org/ 
• Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com/
• Dimitri’s book, The Art of PostgreSQL: https://theartofpostgresql.com/ 
• Blog post about What’s new in SQL:2023: https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/04/sql-2023-is-finished-here-is-whats-new
• PostgreSQL Exercises at pgexercises.com: https://pgexercises.com/
• SQL Murder Mystery for learning SQL: https://mystery.knightlab.com/
• Pgvector extension for Postgres and AI embeddings: https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector
• Vik’s Advent of Code puzzle solutions in SQL on GitHub: https://github.com/xocolatl/advent-of-code
• Stack Overflow data in Postgres, from pgtreats GitHub repo: https://github.com/pgtreats/stackoverflow_in_pg
• OpenStreetMap runs on Postgres: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/38.01/-95.84
• Uber data set: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/uber-tlc-foil-response
• Ideas for fun, open data sets: https://data.world/data-society?entryTypeLabel=dataset&tab=resources
• “Don’t Do This” Timestamp learnings on PostgreSQL wiki: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don't_Do_This#Don.27t_use_timestamp_.28without_time_zone.29

Lots of stories of how folks got started as developers! Andres Freund and Heikki Linnakangas join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore more paths for getting into Postgres on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. How do you do development: with a cup of coffee, with music in the background, maybe at 3am? How do you approach mentoring other developers? Why did you stick with Postgres and make it a career? Lots of lively discussion about building not only code, but relationships in the community, in the open. Also, stories about Heikki’s and Andres’s first Postgres patch submissions, and working via the hackers mailing list. Finally, what advice would you give to your younger self starting in the development world?

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered: 

• Neon: https://neon.tech/ 
• Rob Conery and Scott Hanselman's book: The Imposter's Handbook (https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/1610805353255677953) 
• Path To Citus Con Ep04: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/how-i-got-started-as-a-developer-in-postgres 
• Andres’ first patch to Postgres: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=c43feefa806c81d68115ed03a7f723720cefad31  
• PGConf NYC 2023: https://2023.pgconf.nyc/ 
• Flow book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Flow/QVjPsd1UukEC  
• Archives of Postgres hackers mailing list: https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/ 
• List of Postgres Contributors: https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ 
• Description of Postgres Core Team: https://www.postgresql.org/developer/core/ 
• Postgres Weekly newsletter: https://postgresweekly.com/  

The geospatial world of Postgres is so much more than mapping. Paul Ramsey and Regina Obe join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the "where" on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. What are some of the unexpected use cases for PostGIS, one of the most popular extensions to Postgres? How have Large Language Models helped in the geospatial world? Can you really model almost anything with pgRouting? “Where” is the universal foreign key. They talk about communities and governments using geospatial data and how it's very difficult to build a database that does not have some sort of spatial component to it. Why do people care about PostGIS? Find out more about OpenStreetMap and its place in the open source geospatial world. Finally, Paul and Regina share the origin story for the PostGIS extension to Postgres.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:

• PostGIS: https://postgis.net/  
• FOSS4G NA: https://foss4gna.org/ 
• Ushahidi: https://www.ushahidi.com/  
• Humanitarian Open Street Map: https://www.hotosm.org/  
• OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/ 
• pgRouting: https://pgrouting.org/ 
• Regina Obe’s books: https://locatepress.com/book/pgr  
• Regina’s book “PostGIS In Action”: https://www.manning.com/books/postgis-in-action-third-edition?experiment=B 
• MobilityDB: https://github.com/MobilityDB/MobilityDB 
• Blog: Analyzing GPS trajectories at scale with Postgres, PostGIS, MobilityDB, & Citus: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/analyzing-gps-trajectories-at-scale-with-postgres-mobilitydb-amp/ba-p/1859278  
• OSGeo: https://www.osgeo.org/  
• Simon Willison’s presentation on "The weird world of LLMs": https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/3/weird-world-of-llms/ 
• QGIS: https://qgis.org/en/site/ 
• QGIS “Gentle Introduction” documentation: https://docs.qgis.org/3.28/en/docs/gentle_gis_introduction/ 
• PostGIS Workshops: https://postgis.net/documentation/training/#workshop 
• Locate Press: https://locatepress.com/ 
• FedGeoDay 2023: https://www.fedgeo.us/about-2023 
• Schedule of FOSS4G NA 2023: https://foss4gna.org/schedule.html#schedule 
• FOSS4G Brazil, December 2024: https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/foss4g-2024-has-been-awarded-to-belem-brazil/  
• Paul's keynote talk at PGConfEU in Lisbon in 2018, titled "Put some "where" in your WHERE clause": https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xyXA4-0wmNX7WfiLeH9h10bIkZxrej278-mMaClagys/edit?usp=sharing 

Drop the fear, not the tables. Chelsea Dole and Floor Drees join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the app developer perspective on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. If you’re an app developer, you’re probably already using Postgres. Now what? What do you need to know? Are databases your best friend or your worst enemy? They talk about the steps to becoming more Postgres-savvy. Should you go depth-first or breadth-first in order to learn more about the underlying database? What are Postgres extensions and how do you go about adopting them? Find out more about the strength of what Floor calls “boring technology.” Finally, both guests tell stories of their non-traditional entries into Postgres that led to their deep work with databases today.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode: 

• Fintech startup where Chelsea works, Brex: https://www.brex.com/  
• Open source data platform where Floor works, Aiven: https://aiven.io/  
• “Mission-Critical PostgreSQL Databases on Kubernetes" by Karen Jex at KubeCon Europe 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NBQ9JmOMko 
• The Imposters Handbook by Rob Conery: https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/ 
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781491903063/  
• Devopsdays Amsterdam: https://devopsdays.org/events/2023-amsterdam/welcome/  
• Building Community in Open Source with Floor Drees on the Last Week in AWS podcast: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/building-community-in-open-source-with-floor-drees/ 
• pg_stat_statements: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgstatstatements.html 
• PostGIS: https://postgis.net/  
• “Postgres tips for optimizing Django & Python performance, from my PyCon workshop” by Louise Grandjonc: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2020/05/20/postgres-tips-for-django-and-python/  
• Video of Louise’s PyCon talk, Optimize Django & Python performance with Postgres superpowers: https://youtu.be/dyBLGjCQJHs
• Grafana: https://grafana.com/
• pganalyze: https://pganalyze.com/ 
• auto_explain: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/auto-explain.html 
• EXPLAIN ANALYZE in PostgreSQL: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-explain.html  
• psql: https://www.postgresguide.com/utilities/psql/ 
• Path To Citus Con Episode 05: My favorite ways to learn more about PostgreSQL with Grant Fritchey and Ryan Booz: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/my-favorite-ways-to-learn-more-about-postgresql-with-grant-fritchey-and-ryan-booz 
• Coffee Meets Bagel (dating app): https://coffeemeetsbagel.com/