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

Speaker Interview with Gabriele Bartolini

Could you briefly introduce yourself?
Ciao! My name’s Gabriele Bartolini and I live in Prato, Tuscany, Italy with my lovely Australian/Italian wife and daughters.
I have been working with 2ndQuadrant since 2008 and I am now in charge of the 24/7 support service that we deliver on PostgreSQL with follow-the-sun model. I have always been attracted by Information Technology, but also Entrepreneurship, TeamWork and work organisation. In particular, I am fascinated by the DevOps culture - so if you want to have chat about it, please reach out to me.
I also love music and, when time allows me, I like to play the blues with my electric guitars.
How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?
I have been steadily using PostgreSQL since 2001, including in Australia (where I lived for a couple of years). I have tried to promote its adoption in Italy for a few years, especially in the public sector. In July 2007, I organised the first Italian PGDay in my city, Prato. It was probably the largest community event for PostgreSQL in Europe at that time (over 200 people from all over the world came). It was great. I had the chance to finally know all those developers and users that I had been exchanging emails with for years. But also, we had the chance to lay the path for a European non profit organisation that was later created under the name of “PostgreSQL Europe”, of which I am one of the four founders. PostgreSQL Europe organises PGConf. I have been involved with the Italian Community as well, and am one of the founders of the Italian PostgreSQL Users Group.
I have also been promoting PostgreSQL in Melbourne, Australia, organising the first Australian PGDay in 2013.
Due to both family and business commitments, I am now in a phase where I have little time to dedicate to the community of PostgreSQL, even though PostgreSQL and it’s open source aspects are fundamental values of my daily work.
Have you enjoyed previous pgconf.eu or FOSDEM conferences, either as an attendee or as speaker?
Yes. I have been participating to a few PostgreSQL conferences and spoken to a few of them too.
What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?
My talk will be about Barman, one of the main tools for disaster recovery of PostgreSQL databases. The reason behind this topic is that we never speak enough about disaster recovery in Information Technology, and the culture behind it - whether it is with Barman or not.
The goal of this talk is to show how easy it is to setup a Barman installation and to protect your PostgreSQL databases from data loss in just a few steps. It also gives insights about architectural choices and scalability needs.
What is the audience for your talk?
From a practical point of view, PostgreSQL administrators and Linux administrators. From a wider angle, CTOs and CIOs. I will be using this Vagrant and Ansible based playground during the talk: https://github.com/2ndquadrant-it/ansible-postgresql-barman-playground.
What existing knowledge should the attendee have?
If your intention is to then install Barman yourself in your infrastructure, then you need at least basics of PostgreSQL administration and Linux administration.
If your intention is to get an idea of what Barman can do in your organisation, then you do not need any knowledge (just curiosity).
What is the one feature in PostgreSQL 12 which you like most?
Improvements in declarative partitioning performance.
Which other talk at this year's conference would you like to see?
Postgres Partitioning: How Far We've Come
Which measure, action, feature or activity would—in your eyes—help to accelerate the adoption of PostgreSQL?
Better native integration with external monitoring and alerting systems.