This site is about a previous instance of this event. For the current event, please see the updated site.

Speaker Interview with Franck Pachot

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I’ve always been working with databases, for more than 20 years, in all areas from development to operations, consulting, and training… Mostly in consulting companies, and mostly with Oracle database. I’m also advocating for knowledge sharing with a large presence on social networks, blogs, articles, conferences...
How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?
I started to look at Open Source databases recently and find that the PostgreSQL community is a nicely special one: the community has existed for a long time, supported but not directed by any commercial vendors, open to discuss changes, allowing extensions and welcoming new tools, but also never compromising the stability of the product.
Have you enjoyed previous pgconf.eu or FOSDEM conferences, either as an attendee or as speaker?
This is my first time at pgconf.eu. I’m speaking a lot at Oracle conferences and went out of this comfort zone last July for PostgresLondon2019, and really enjoyed.
What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?
My talk is about tools and methods to approach performance tuning. Many people, like me, came to PostgreSQL after years of experience with Oracle and critical database. I approach the performance on PostgreSQL with the same methods I used on those systems. And I have found tools that are not well-known in the PostgreSQL community. Some of those tools were built by people also coming from Oracle. Basically, I demo 3 tools to cover the 3 layers we may have to tune: the system, the database, and the application.
What is the audience for your talk?
The audience can be beginners or advanced PostgreSQL users concerned by the performance of their database application, and looking for the right approach to drill down to the root cause and improve the response time without any blind guess on general statistics or ratios.
What is the one feature in PostgreSQL 12 which you like most?
I’m looking forward to use “Inlined WITH queries”, because I like Common Table Expressions, for better readability, but may not want that they are optimized separately. SQL is a declarative language and the way we describe the result we want should not influence how it is processed.
Which measure, action, feature or activity would—in your eyes—help to accelerate the adoption of PostgreSQL?
Maybe more feedback from the industry would help. Commercial software vendors get feedback on their product usage through sales and support. With Open source, it can be hard to get it from people who are just users and are not engaged in the community. All ways to encourage people to present their ‘customer cases’ would benefit.