March 29, 2026 · 4:38 pm

Prairie Postgres Second Developers’ Summit and Why You Should Participate

In my current position as Database Architect at DRW, I talk with end users more than I ever did in my life. Our end users are application developers who look at PostgreSQL from a very utilitarian perspective. Trust me, they do not care whether Postgres is the most advanced DBMS or not. They are very pragmatic: they need a database that will help them accomplish their goals: write the data fast, store reliably, read anything in milliseconds, and run analytics.

None of the software engineering positions lists the knowledge of any relational database as a requirement. Or any database for that matter. It’s a “nice to have” at best. They come to me asking: is Postgres a good tool for what we need the database to do? And I always reply: Postgres is good for anything you need to do, but you need to know how to use it.

We develop new cool features and make Postgres more powerful; however, many of these features are barely used. Big consulting companies are very much aware of the problems their big clients have, but they are rarely aware of the struggles of thousands of small startups.  

If you are a software engineer who use Postgres, and if you are frustrated with bloated tables, “autovacuum blocking your processes,” partitioned tables being slow, indexes not used, CPU being close to 100% most times, or your system running out of memory, chances are there are some easy fixes that will make your life better and your satisfaction with Postgres might reach the next level:).

Or maybe you were able to successfully resolve your Postgres problems, and now you think it’s embarrassing that you didn’t figure them out earlier. Don’t be embarrassed, be proud that you figured things out! And trust me, that very moment, dozens of developers are struggling with the problem you successfully resolved.

In either case, it would be totally worth your time if you join us on April 14!  And if you think that Claude will solve all your problems, it’s only partially true. Talking with Claude will never substitute for talking with your peers. In fact, Claude can be exceptionally helpful, but only if you know what to ask and how to validate the answer.  And you might find the answers to these questions as well.

To attend, please register here: https://www.meetup.com/illinois-prairie-postgresql-user-group/events/313788239/

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March 25, 2026 · 8:35 am

Prairie PUG March 17 recording

PaulWhalen’s talk recording is now available! Enjoy!

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March 19, 2026 · 5:57 pm

Prairie Postgres March Meetup

Yes, it was St. Patrick’s Day, and also Illinois Primaries, and the weather was beyond bad, but we still had a good crowd!

Pizza always comes first :), because nobody is going to go hungry! Whether you stay for Postgres or not is up to you, so I am assuming that when people are coming and staying, it’s not just for pizza 🍕

On a more serious note, huge thanks to Paul Whalen! Paul presented the talk Early Learnings Building Apps on Postgres in the Claude Code Era: The Importance of the Iteration Loop. It was incredibly interesting, and the attendees kept asking questions for another 40 minutes after the talk. I hope we will keep this conversation going at our Developers’ Summit on April 14! Sign up to join us – here is the RSVP link! And please share what topics you would like to discuss – here!

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March 8, 2026 · 8:10 am

Listening to John “maddog” Hall at SCaLE x23

That was the first time I listened to John “Maddog” Hall, a “live Linux legend.” To say I enjoyed this talk is not enough: I absorbed every minute of it. Everything he said really resonated with me. I felt reassured that what I am trying to do in Postgres education, all we are doing at Prairie Postgres, is the right thing to do.

I am honored to be an LPI Board member and to contribute to this organization’s work.

I spoke at the same track on the same day, but with way fewer people present 🙂

A picture taken at the LPI booth with other Board members:)

All the talks were livestreamed and are available here:

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February 25, 2026 · 5:30 am

February Meetup: slides and recording are available!

Thank you, Shaun, for presenting, and huge thanks to all participants for an engaging and productive discussion!

As always, I am glad that people from all over the world can join us virtually, but if you are local, consider coming next time! We have pizza, and you can’t consume it virtually!

New Postgres AI EcosystemDownload

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February 7, 2026 · 9:27 pm

Talking about PostgreSQL and Academia

As I already shared, I will give a talk about PostgreSQL in Academic institutions at SCaLE 23x. I was supposed to prepare a short promotional video, but anyone who knows me knows that me and “short” does not really go together (unless you are talking about my height:)).

This video is three times longer than a promotional video should be, but even if it won’t be on the SCaLE YouTube channel, I thought I will share. My talk is at 5PM on Friday, and I hope to make at least some people interested!

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February 6, 2026 · 10:00 am

Prague PostgreSQL Dev Day – a very late follow up

Everyone who was in Prague on January 27-28 has already posted their feedback and moved on, so I am late, as it often happens. However, I still maintain that better late than never!

This year was the second time I attended this event, and this time, I didn’t have to rush out immediately after my training session, and was able to stay longer and connect with many attendees. Same as last time, I was very impressed with the event organization and the very warm, welcoming atmosphere. Many thanks to Tomas Vondra!

I delivered the same workshop I did last year. Last year, I ran out of time despite my best efforts, and since I hate to be that presenter who doesn’t keep track of time and then rushes through the last twenty slides, I made an effort to remove the content I presumed I wouldn’t take time to cover in advance. It looks like I overdid it a little bit, because I ended up finishing earlier, but I think it’s still better than later 🙂

My usual lament about these training sessions is gender uniformity, and I still do not know what is the right solution for this problem!

Also, many thanks to Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek for extending my 63rd birthday celebration for another week 🙂

As it often happens, my only regret is that there were so many interesting talks happening at the same time! I could have avoided FOMO if I had checked out the Nordic PG schedule earlier, because some of the talks will be replayed there. I could plan it better! But in any case, I had a great time 🙂

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January 17, 2026 · 9:14 am

Illinois Prairie PUG January Edition

We just had the first meetup of 2026, and all I can say is a huge thank you to Ryan Booz and all attendees, both in person and virtual!

I was so happy to see many familiar faces, as well as first-timers. We had great attendance (one of those rare situations when I didn’t order enough pizza :)). Ryan Booz, who, as I previously mentioned, is one of the few out-of-towners who dare to face Chicago winter weather, presented a great talk on configuring Postgres for effective logging and query-optimization analysis.

I liked the fact that we had 30 participants that early in the year, when people are just starting to get back to their regular activity level. More importantly, we now have a group of active members who not only keep coming to the meetups but also actively listen, participate in discussions, and stay long after the presentation ends, discussing what they just heard, sharing experiences, suggesting future topics, and talking about how we can make Postgres more appealing to application developers! I always have to remind the last group of people staying late that, as much as I love them all, I need to close the house, but those are my happiest moments!

On days like that, I have this strong feeling of community building happening right here, and that’s the most rewarding thing I could wish for.

Presentation slides and sql examples are available here, and below is the meetup recording. Please not the quick turnaround of the video! We tried!

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January 6, 2026 · 5:15 am

pg_acm is here!

I am writing this post over the weekend but scheduling it to be published on Tuesday, after the PG DATA CfP closes, because I do not want to distract anyone, including myself, from the submission process.

A couple of months ago, I created a placeholder in my GitHub, promising to publish pg_acm before the end of the year. The actual day I pushed the initial commit was January 3, but it still counts, right? At least, it happened before the first Monday of 2026!

It has been about two years since I first spoke publicly about additional options I would love to see in PostgreSQL privileges management. Now I know it was not the most brilliant idea to frame it as “what’s wrong with Postgres permissions,” and this time I am much better with naming.

pg_acm stands for “Postgres Access Control Management.” The key feature of this framework is that each schema is created with a set of predefined roles and default privileges, which makes it easy to achieve complete isolation between different projects sharing the same database, and allows authorized users to manage access to their data without having superuser privileges.

Please take a look, give it a try, and let me know what’s wrong with my framework 🙂

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December 1, 2025 · 7:28 am

November Meetup Recording

And our last 2025 recording is here! Check out Jay Miller’s talk!

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