EDB is ready for Valencia: Meet the Team at PGConf EU 2026

The countdown to PGConf EU 2026 is officially on! From October 20-23, the global Postgres community will descend upon the beautiful Palacio de Congresos in Valencia, Spain. EDB joins as a Platinum level sponsor. 

Beyond our sponsorship, our own Andreas Scherbaum and Martín Marqués are part of the organizing team, and I joined this year’s Talk Selection Committee.

Below is an overview of the sessions and community events EDB colleagues are running.

Main Conference Talks (Oct 20-22)

Our engineers and architects will tackle everything from critical scaling architectures to compliance and JSON management.

In “Postgres for Everything, Until It Isn't” PostgreSQL power couple Petr Jelínek (EDB) with Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek (Xata) pose the question: Postgres is the ultimate general-purpose transactional engine, but what happens past a massive scale? They’ll explore the rise of compositional data architectures, where Postgres acts as a transactional control plane while extensions like pg_search, pg_lake, and pg_duckdb embed specialized external execution engines directly into Postgres workflows.

Traditionally, Postgres availability is bound by WAL volume; the server can’t accept connections post-crash until everything is replayed. In “Can We Skip Recovery? The Architecture of On-Demand WAL Replay”, Srinath Reddy dives deep into an experimental architecture and implementation for on-demand WAL replay, allowing the server to open for connections immediately while recovering individual pages lazily. Srinath will unpack the design hurdles and the myriad of implementation difficulties, as well as the  challenges caused by the fast pace of Postgres development.

The EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is now reality. It forces software manufacturers to put strict security and update procedures in place, heavily impacting enterprise open-source software and sponsors. Peter Eisentraut will explore what this means for the loose, global structure of the PostgreSQL community and how we must evolve to meet these standards.

Schemaless freedom in a relational database sounds like a dream until you hit odd behaviors, unused indexes, or erratic performance. In his session “JSON in PostgreSQL - evil data type or just needs to be tamed?”, Boriss Mejías walks through a real-world case study to tame the JSONB "beast," looking at indexing, table partitioning, and the role of TOAST tables.

Postgres doesn’t just live as source code. Devrim Gündüz, who has been packaging Postgres and related software for the community for two decades, takes attendees through the entire lifecycle: what to package, how to do it efficiently, and how to maintain packages sustainably over time. Look for his session “The process of RPM packaging in the PostgreSQL ecosystem” on the schedule. 

In his session “pg_plan_advice: Plan Stability and User Planner Control for PostgreSQL?” Robert Haas introduces his latest contribution to PostgreSQL. pg_plan_advice is a module designed to tackle one of the database’s most notorious pain points: unpredictable query planner behavior.Shifting or misleading stats can cause Postgres to abruptly swap a lightning-fast query plan for a slow one, and developers have historically had very few ways to intervene when the optimizer goes off course. Robert will walk attendees through how pg_plan_advice addresses this by giving users unprecedented control to lock in known good plans, enforce preferred alternatives, and debug planning failures. 

Sponsored sessions

Part of our sponsorship package allows us to bring additional content to the schedule. 

In his sponsor keynote, Tom Kincaid reflects on the remarkable 30-year evolution of PostgreSQL, driven by a resilient open-source community and EDB's critical contributions to its development, security, and performance. Looking beyond past milestones, Tom explores the bright future of the strengthening Postgres ecosystem while sharing valuable, hard-won lessons and offering a gentle hint at what happens when it’s time for the next generation to run with the torch. 

For a high-stakes system routing emergency calls across disconnected islands, "zero-downtime" isn't a business metric, it's a matter of life and death. In this joint session, Boriss Mejías and Adam Wright bridge the gap between extreme architectural demands and database reality. They will dissect a near-zero-downtime major PostgreSQL upgrade on a live active-active system, moving past simple "afternoon demos" to tackle the brutal production realities of conflict resolution, network partitions, and cluster management. 

As AI agents become increasingly pervasive, Bilge Ince and Jigar Mody present EDB's dual-focused strategy to ensure these agents can access data both efficiently and securely. Their approach positions Postgres as a critical enabler in this new landscape by developing Postgres-based agent memory solutions to drive better outcomes, while simultaneously building agent-resilient Postgres frameworks to guarantee safe, secure deployments and adoption. 

Community Events Day (Friday, October 23)

The final day of the conference is dedicated to deep-dive, interactive summits and workshops EDB colleagues are co-hosting and presenting in several tracks:

PostgreSQL on Kubernetes Summit

Co-hosted by Floor Drees (that’s me!) & Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek (Xata), this is a half-day event focused entirely on running Postgres in cloud-native environments. Expect cross-vendor collaboration, operator internal deep dives (Zalando, CloudNativePG, Crunchy), and GitOps strategies.

EDB sessions: 

• PostgreSQL(OAuth) + Keycloak = Kubernetes native authentication by Jonathan González, explores the OAuth integration landed in Postgres 18.
• Unified Observability for PostgreSQL on Kubernetes by Gabriele Rossini, on using pg_tracing, pg_stat_ch, ClickHouse, and Grafana to bring logs, traces, and metrics into a single pane of glass.

Autonomous Postgres: From Scripts to Self-Driving Database

Co-hosted by Vibhor Kumar with Marc Linster (DBTune) & Ryan Booz (pganalyze), this is a working session moving past the AI hype to discuss what automated tuning and machine learning actually look like in production.

EDB Sessions: 

• Your Database Has No Idea Who's Asking by Bilge Ince, leveraging the open-source pg-airman-mcp server to build governed AI data layers that handle PII and deprecated tables safely.
• Postgres Needs an Agent Loop:  What Autonomous Database Operations Actually Require, by Matt Yonkovit
• Autonomous Postgres: From Self-Managed Operations to AI-Ready Data Platform - Rajesh Nagpal & Anil Kumar
• Postgres as an Execution Environment for AI Workflows: Failure Modes, Hooks, and Patchable Primitive - Vibhor Kumar (reserve)

New PostgreSQL Community Members Summit

Co-hosted by Andreas Scherbaum & Cornelia Biacsics (Microsoft), an inclusive workshop designed to lower barriers for newcomers. Learn how to navigate mailing lists, the Wiki, CommitFests, and find your own concrete path to contributing.

EDB Session: Creating Major Release Notes by core team member Bruce Momjian.

Organizing and Growing Community Events

Co-hosted by Andreas Scherbaum with Pat Wright, Mark Wong (PgEdge), & Hettie Dombrovskaya (DRW). A breakout-style workshop focused on training the next generation of event volunteers. Topics include conference planning, developer outreach, artwork sourcing, and growing the local speaker pool.

Storytelling for Technical Communication

Co-hosted by Boriss Mejías with Divya Sharma (Supabase), Teresa Lopes & Derk van Veen (Adyen). Brilliant technical ideas get lost without great communication. This hands-on workshop provides concrete guidelines to turn your project updates, bug reports, or feature requests into compelling stories.

A Postgres Ecosystem Foundation?

Co-hosted by Floor Drees & Alastair Turner (Percona), this is meant as an open town-hall discussion on how the community can better manage succession, support maintainers, and reduce risk when critical extension projects scale down their teams.

PG Outreach Unconference 

Loreta Ozolina, with Valeria Kaplan (Data Egret) and Chris Ellis (Nexteam) look forward to exchanging ideas on how PostgreSQL can better engage beyond its core audience in the PG Outreach Unconference. 

Note: The Community Events Day requires a separate ticket. Don't forget to grab your add-on ticket on the registration page! 

Connect with us in Valencia!

Whether you want to talk about cloud-native Postgres operators, dive into the future of on-demand recovery, or simply grab some awesome EDB swag, our team cannot wait to meet you. So swing by our booth!

See you in Spain!