Speaker Interview

Daniel Westermann

[x],[y],zheap - What is it good for?
11:10–11:55
Auditorium

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Daniel Westermann, I am working for dbi services in Switzerland but do live in the very south of Germany. At dbi services I am responsible for everything around open source technologies and may daily business is to support our customers in running their business on open source products.

How do you engage with the PostgreSQL community?

I am helping in running the Swiss PostgreSQL user group and also help with organizing PGConf.DE in Germany. I am trying to share as much of my knowledge as I can by blogging around various topics related to PostgreSQL. For dbi services I am developing and also give our PostgreSQL trainings, attend and organize conferences and meetups.

Have you enjoyed previous pgDay Paris or other PostgreSQL Europe conferences, either as attendee or as speaker?

This is the first time I’ll be attending pgDay Paris and I am really looking forward to it. I’ve attended the last three European Conferences (one of them as a speaker), usually speak at the Swiss PGDay and I’ve also spoken at PGConf.DE, PGIBZ and PGDay Amsterdam.

What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

Basically my talk will be about bloat in PostgreSQL and how zheap promises to mostly avoid that. Why that topic? PostgreSQL handles most of the workloads very well but for update heavy workloads bloat can be become a real issue. I believe that zheap can help a lot for some use cases and having choice (thanks to pluggable storage introduced in PostgreSQL 12) will convince even more shops to use PostgreSQL for all kinds of workloads. With advantages there are also disadvantages and zheap is no exception to that. Understanding both and seeing that live, this is what my talk is about.

What is the audience for your talk?

Everybody involved in designing applications on top of PostgreSQL as well as DBAs.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have in order to follow your talk?

A basic understanding about PostgreSQL should be fine to easily follow this talk.

Which missing feature would you most like to see in PostgreSQL?

zheap

Thank you!