Postgres Conference 2026

 Postgres Conference 2026 was held in San Jose, California, and once again, I was lucky to be invited to speak. This is a great show for the 'hallway track' where you talk to members of the community and discover many interesting things.

I had a brief conversation with two early contributors to the original PostgreSQL project. One said he was surprised by how much of his code was still in the code base after FORTY YEARS. 

AI and MCP are fully interlaced in many projects.  The one that struck me the most was PgEdge's AI DBA Workbench. It features three tiers of detection and an agentic AI assistant to watch it all. I was talking with CEO David Mitchell about it and told him about my past frustrations with Percona's PMM. He then told me author of the AI DBA Workbench also wrote PMM. And PgAdmin4. 

Observability seems to be the hot, underlying theme this year. Take a look at pg_collector. It is an SQL script that gathers valuable database information and consolidates it into a single HTML file, providing a convenient way to view and navigate the report's sections. One issue with PostgreSQL management is that it is a very complex product with about 400 different settings, and nobody can know in depth how they work. Pg_collector covers a lot of the territory by showing duplicate indexes, invalid indexes, unused indexes, autovacuum parameter, sequences with less than 10% of the remaining values, orphaned prepared transactions, connections without SSL,  excessive logging parameters, track_counts parameter,  synchronous_commit parameter, invalid databases, tables with more than 20% dead rows, transaction ID TXID (Wraparound),  tables that have autovacuum_enabled=off on table level, inactive replication slots, logical replication spill files, and outdated extensions.

For more on observability, check out Ryan Booz's session from the second day, the one not about beekeeping.

This is being written on the morning of the last of three days. I needed to capture some of the highlights of the show before the cache between my ears is flushed. If there is a PostgreSQL conference near you, or a local user group, you NEED to attend. You get some education, build your network, and gain insights into a database world past your horizons. 

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