Introduction

PGDay Boston 2026 was a rewarding reminder of why I value the PostgreSQL community so much. It was delightful to reconnect with familiar faces, meet new people, and finally put some faces to names for the first time. One of the best parts of the day was the sense that this community is larger than any one employer or project. It is built on shared curiosity, shared responsibility, and a willingness to help one another learn. I’m honored to have been able to share my own thoughts in my Disaster Recovery talk as well.

The keynote, Michael Stonebraker’s “Where Did Postgres Come From?”, was a standout for me. I especially appreciated the history of Postgres and the years before Postgres, during the Ingres era. It was striking to hear how the project could have ended up as just another academic system, yet instead grew into something enduring because people outside of UC Berkeley took ownership of it and built a broader community around it. That story felt like a good reminder that open source succeeds not only through technical merit, but through stewardship and continuity.

I also enjoyed Brian Brennglass’s talk, “Managing and Observing Locks.” His demos made an intimidating topic much easier to follow, and I found the practical framing especially useful. Shree Vidhya Sampath’s session on leveraging Patroni’s synchronous replication while running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes was another highlight. I appreciated the clear discussion of election behavior, synchronous replication, and failover scenarios, including failure modes I had not experimented with myself.

Robert Haas’ “pg_plan_advice: Plan Stability and User Planner Control for PostgreSQL?” was impressive in his attention to detail, especially the way he tested edge cases that people might not think to check. Bruce Momjian’s “What’s Missing in Postgres?” was also thought-provoking because it framed missing features not as oversights, but often as deliberate choices shaped by the needs of the broader community. Ryan Booz’s “Mastering PostgreSQL Partitioning: Supercharge Performance and Simplify Maintenance” rounded out the day well with a useful refresher on partitioning behavior, tradeoffs, and current workarounds.

Overall, the event benefited me in both personal and professional ways. Professionally, it deepened my understanding of PostgreSQL internals, operational patterns, and ecosystem tooling. Personally, it renewed my appreciation for the community that has grown around Postgres and the care that goes into keeping it healthy. Thank you Tom Kincaid, Ken Rugg, Erik Pohi, Greg Burd, Kanchan Mohitey, Shihao Zhong, and so many others – along with PGUS – who worked hard to make the first PGDay Boston a smashing success! I look forward to staying involved and attending future events in Boston and beyond.