Welcoming 2025 with an abundance of open source events, development, and activity - oh my!
Time for our quarterly newsletter detailing what our team here at Data Bene has been up to this year so far (with some interesting events, news, & resources we wanted to highlight ✨)
We’re excited to share with you where we’ve been, what we’ve been developing, and what we’ve been creating within the PostgreSQL space and beyond!
Community events
We sponsored (& attended) CERN PgDay 2025, run in collaboration with the Swiss PostgreSQL User Group. This year's selections of talks did not disappoint, including such topics as "Harnessing Postgres and HPC for Petabyte-Scale Variable Star Classification in Astronomy" and "From Queries to Pints: Building a Beer Recommendation System with pgvector". This event is intended to turn into an annual event under the umbrella of SwissPUG, which we are very much looking forward to.
Evan Stanton from our team is involved in organizing the PostgreSQL Meetup in Munich, and the first event in January was a success with excellent talks on "What's new in PostgreSQL 17" and "FerretDB v2". Slides can be found here and you can follow on LinkedIn or join the Telegram group to be notified about future sessions to come.
AlpOSS 2025 was a thriving "Open Source Software" event at the Echirolles City Council for publishers, service providers, local authorities, and open source users in the broad sense. Here, we were a sponsor of the event and Cédric Villemain presented on "PostgreSQL, the recommended free database" to raise awareness of Postgres within this generalized audience and explore the history of the project. The event as a whole was free to attend, and there are plans for this event series to continue in 2026. While not all sessions were recorded, a good portion can be viewed on PeerTube.
FOSDEM 2025 is a free event for software developers in Brussels that doesn't even require registration to attend. It is always a huge event, with thousands of developers in attendance. Cédric Villemain traveled here to present "Stats roll, baby, stats roll." to discuss defining new statistics (along with associated views and functions) within PostgreSQL 18. Find the slides from his presentation here and the video recording here.
At pgDay Paris, we were sponsors of the event and Frédéric Delacourt presented “Waiting for PostgreSQL 18” to break down some interesting upcoming features within PG18. Some recordings for the event can be found on YouTube.
SCaLE 22x in Pasadena, California as always was a success, with thousands of developers in attendance for the largest community-run open-source and free-software focused conference in North America. Sarah Conway wrote up a summary of the event in our blog, and you can also view the recordings from the event to learn from home.
We proudly sponsored the 9th annual PostgreSQL Conference Germany (PGConf.DE 2025) in Berlin this May, where Evan Stanton presented on "Postgres and Life Science: From Cells to Stars". Read his discussion of the event and his talk here on our blog.
We had to attend PostgreSQL Development Conference (PGConf.dev 2025), the classic annual event occurring in Montreal, Canada for PostgreSQL users, developers, and community organizers. As always, it was a hotbed of collaboration, innovative discussions, and essential networking. We were pleased to have been a part of it with Cédric Villemain presenting on "PostgreSQL Container Groups, aka cgroups down the road". He focused on the integration of cgroups and PSI, along with their benefits and drawbacks in the PostgreSQL context. Interested in watching? The recording of his presentation is available on YouTube, along with other talks from the conference.
Where are we going next? …a lot of places! Follow on our social media channels (LinkedIn, Mastodon) to keep an eye out for where our team will be along with where we’re presenting next and which conferences we’re supporting.
Extension development
StatsMgr was initially released in January for efficient and organized management of statistics. It provides structured snapshotting of internal metrics such as WAL, checkpoints, and SLRU using background workers and shared memory, and exposes them via simple C and SQL APIs. …Hey! Speaking of - We want to hear from you!👂
➡️ Is this useful for your observability tooling?
➡️ Should parts of StatsMgr be proposed for core inclusion?
🖥️ Check out the project on Codeberg
📚 Read more about it (or watch 📹 the interview with the creator, Cédric Villemain)
Besides that, our team has been active in contributing to open source projects since the year began, primarily in collaboration with IvorySQL and Citus Data (besides internal development projects, coming soon!).
As an example, Cédric Villemain was named in the Citus 13.0 release for his contributions in fault tolerance.
Content
We released six podcast episodes in collaboration with Xata.io, a database platform for PostgreSQL, covering extension development between our two companies in a lively discussion between Sarah Conway & Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek along with guest appearances from developers, extension contributors & creators, and more.
Check out Postgres Café on YouTube to learn more about each of these extensions, or click each respective link below to read about them in a blogpost format.
Exploring pgroll for zero-downtime schema changes with Andrew Farries
Expand monitoring capabilities with StatsMgr with Cédric Villemain
Solving schema replication gaps with pgstream with Esther Minano Sanz
Deploying distributed PostgreSQL at scale with Citus Data with Stéphane Carton
Building PostgreSQL extensions in Zig using pgzx with Tudor Golubenco
Contributing to Open Source with Andrew Cuccinello
🚀 Our team enjoyed doing Postgres Café so much that we are thinking about continuing the podcast with extension creators & maintainers across the globe! Follow us on social media (LinkedIn, Mastodon) to keep an eye out for future episodes.
💬 We would also greatly appreciate your feedback and would especially like to hear from you if you are an extension maintainer or someone with an interesting project in the PostgreSQL community that you would like to discuss on the podcast. Reach out anytime at community@data-bene.io to let us know.
Besides the podcast and community conference focused blogs listed above under “Community events”, we released a fun technical piece (hint: on April Fool’s day) that you may find interesting… if you do, reach out to us at community@data-bene.io, we’d love to hear from you 👂
Once Upon a Time in a Confined Database - PostgreSQL, QRCodes, and the Art of Backup Without a Network
Interesting news
Useful resources
Why Upgrade PostgreSQL? (Calculator to track changes between PostgreSQL minor & major versions)
Postgres-contrib (Let the PostgreSQL community know about folks who are contributing to the Postgres project in ways that aren’t code-related)
Tell your open source story
Are you using open source technology in your infrastructure? Have you been using PostgreSQL for years, or did you just migrate? Would you be interested in sharing your experience in a webinar, interview, or blogpost? Collaborate with us! We’d love to help others learn about what is possible in the world of PostgreSQL and associated free and open source software. Contact anytime at community@data-bene.io.
Phew, that’s all for now! Catch you next time ✌️🐘