Gwen Shapira

Introducing the pgconf.dev 2026 conference t-shirt! 🐘🎉 This year we're celebrating 30 years of PostgreSQL, and Slonik is dressed for the occasion. The only way to get one? Be there. See you in Vancouver, May 19–22.

PGConf.dev 2026 needs volunteers! Room hosts, registration desk, and more. If you're attending in Vancouver, we'd love your help. Email contact@pgconf.dev to sign up! Details: https://2026.pgconf....

Tuesday is community engagement day 🐘 Hot take: it is the best day! Full of panels and discussions. Whether you're a first-timer or a longtime contributor, there's a seat at the table. Schedule (more sessions still being added!) → https://2026.pgconf....

The pgconf.dev 2026 schedule is stacked 🐘✨ WAL internals, query planning, logical replication, temporal data, columnar storage, 30 years of Postgres retrospective… and cake cutting. Something for every Postgres nerd. Full schedule → https://2026.pgconf....

Poster sessions are honestly my favorite for complex deepdive topics. It is visual, conversational, collaborative and includes coffee. Just how I like my deep technical content.

PGConf.dev 2026: top things to do at the conference: • Debate MVCC trivia with strangers • Discover a feature you didn’t know you needed • Realize you’re not the only one who reads pg_waldump for fun Registration and CFP are open.

CFP for PGConf.dev 2026 is open until Jan 16 🐘 Tips for strong proposals: • Share what you discovered. Not just what you built. • Be specific • Discuss bigger Postgres picture • Failures welcome Be specific, connect to Postgres internals, and don’t hide the messy bits.

At what point do we stop saying “worth its weight in gold” and start saying “worth its weight in high-end GPU”?

So.. Pierre Barre just built an NFS server implementation on SlateDB. ZeroFS is today days old, but it's going to get wild. Bottomless storage and checkpoints mean instant FS snapshots (zero overhead). github.com/Barre/zerofs

I use a spreadsheet to track all my documentation It's important to keep all your docs in a row

Videos from PgConfDev are starting to show up on YouTube! Great time to catch up on both the new content and the amazing talks from past events. You can start with my talk: "Scaling Postgres to Million Tenants" www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfAS...

So, Tensor (as in Pytorch) is just like a vector, except that it is somehow better for GPUs? Did I get that right?

Cats are great, actually.

New blog: Using Postgres pg_test_fsync tool for testing low latency writes An easy to use tool that comes with standard Postgres installation, for testing write latency of devices where you put your WAL/redo logs and any other files requiring low write latency. (link in reply)

I feel like I've found a new controlling meme for open source contribution and innovation.

I've registered it with context7 so it's now available as up-to-date nile documentation via the context7 MCP context7.com/www.thenile....

🚨 New blog alert: Postgres 18 beta 1 was released last week, and includes native support for UUIDv7. Great opportunity to explain why UUIDv7 is a great fit for your database keys, and show you how to use them in PG18. www.thenile.dev/blog/uuidv7

You know the advice to say "thank you" instead of "sorry"? It looks like ChatGPT took it to heart. Me: You just said something incorrect. ChatGPT: Thank you for keeping it precise.

Preparing a presentation (this is a draft from early in the year, so probably preparing for Monster Scale). Looks like a mess, but IIRC, the result was actually good.

PGConf.dev 2025 starts in 13 days. Conference swag is starting to arrive in Montreal. Are your travel plans set? You can still register. https://2025.pgconf.... #Postgresql #PGConf.dev

We have a new venue for PGConf NYC 2025 and a new hotel to go with it! Check it out and book now:

Folks at Google: there's no longer a button to get the PDF of your research papers directly from your website. Instead you have to do a hop through Google Scholar. Is that intentional? Seems worse than it used to be before.

Running TPC-C can be a bit challenging. Running pgbench is easy (it ships with Postgres and uses simple Postgres configs), but its main built-in script is TPC-B. Thankfully, Ryo Kanbayashi wrote a pgbench script that is TPC-C-like: github.com/ryogrid/tpcc...

Serious question: Why do so many developers hate stored procedures?

⚡️ LAST DAYS for DataEngBytes 2025 Percolating tickets! After April 30th, prices increase from $449 to $499. Don't miss Oceania's premier data engineering & ML conference this July in Sydney & Melbourne! dataengbytes.com

What great engineering looks like: invisible at most times… except when it matters. Had no idea an iPhone would measure water presence on a charging port and warn for it. But it does! Was at a pool and a few hours later when plugging it in got this helpful message.

Happy Caturday!

Movie you’ve watched more than six times using gifs. (“Hard mode” no Star Wars, Star Trek, or LOTR)

I blogged a deep dive on how "drop column" works in Postgres - inspecting the Postgres catalog and dumping data files to discover what Vacuum really does to dropped columns and why it doesn't violate GDPR. www.thenile.dev/blog/drop-co...

If a bio-lab decides to start a metal band, they can call it: “Parasite Host”. (Sorry. I’ll see myself out)

Somehow @tanelpoder.com managed to combine my two favorite things: * Benchmarks * Cats github.com/tanelpoder/c... If there's a way to make this generate ice-cream, I think perfection will be achieved.

I have some #AWS #Lambda code examples that I used to deploy with #Serverless framework. Unfortunately, v3 is not maintained and is kinda broken, and v4 has both license and functionality changes that I can't really adopt. How do y'all deploy to AWS Lambda these days?

Just signed up to your product. Don’t make me: ❌ Confirm email ❌ Log in again ❌ 10 step tutorial ❌ Find an API key Just show me why this product rocks. One page. One “wow.” That’s it. ** Nile-Auth lets you redirect to anything after signup - use this power responsibly!

Fountain pen Friday! I asked ChatGPT to imagine the result of Pelikan and Kaweco merger…

turns out that with facebook's pdq hashing algorithm, you can hash every image that goes through the firehose. minimal cpu required. fun stuff! then just throw pgvector on top and boom

The KubeCon NA CFP is open now until May 27th! KubeCon is over, time to get ready for #KubeCon! events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-clou...

Authentication is part of web security - and as such it can be intimidating. All these attack scenarios, secrets, encryption layers, protocols, mitigations and rules. Luckily, James Mickens summarized all we need to know in his classic paper "This World of Ours":

“There's no machine known that is more efficient than a human on a bicycle. Bowl of oatmeal, 30 miles - you can't come close to that." - Bill Nye

Just realized that the two books I’m currently reading go well together.

Spring #caturday is for enjoying the hammock.