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Speaker Interview with Burak Yucesoy

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I'm Burak Yucesoy from Netherlands. I used to work for Citus Data and develop distributed database based on PostgreSQL. With the acquisition of the Citus Data by Microsoft, I now work at Microsoft, developing the same product, but for Azure ecosystem.
In the past, I spend time on a wide range of topics from flying robots to machine learning. Now I'm working on in distributed databases and PostgreSQL.
How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?
Mostly by developing extensions on top of PostgreSQL and attending conferences. I was at PostgresOpen SV, pgconf.eu, PGDay Istanbul either as a speaker or attendee. Apart from that, I'm part of the team which develops our open source PostgreSQL extension, Citus, which makes PostgreSQL a distributed database. I'm also the maintainer of postgresql-hll extension.
Have you enjoyed previous pgconf.eu or FOSDEM conferences, either as an attendee or as speaker?
I attended two previous pgconf.eu conference at Warsaw and Lisbon as a speaker. I enjoyed a lot thanks to good talk selections and opportunity of meeting new people from PostgreSQL community.
What will your training be about, exactly? Why this topic?
My talk will be a tutorial about how to develop an extension for PostgreSQL. I will give this talk with my colleague Onder Kalaci. PostgreSQL comes with a rich extension API. It allows you to define new functions, types, and operators. It even allows you to modify some of its core parts like planner, executor or storage engine. I think this is pretty cool.
However right now, there are very limited resources to learn how to develop an extension. Even the PostgreSQL documentation (which I think one of the best documentations I come across) only covers the surface of extension development. I learned most of the details by reading PostgreSQL code and from my peers in Citus Data. I wanted to ease the process for people interested in extension development by giving this talk.
What is the audience for your training?
Anyone who wants to learn more about PostgreSQL extension development and PostgreSQL internal magic.
What existing knowledge should the attendee have?
Understanding of C code would help a lot. Little bit information about PostgreSQL internals would be nice but not mandatory. We will cover necessary bits.
What is the one feature in PostgreSQL 12 which you like most?
Pluggable storage. Its effect is not obvious to the end user right now but it will open lots of new opportunities in the future.
Which other talk at this year's conference would you like to see?