PGConf.dev 2026: Why It Remains My Favorite Postgres Conference — A fantastic trip report from last week’s PGConf.dev event in Vancouver. Along with many pictures of the fun, Cary has detailed summaries of the talks he attended, topics raised at the unconference sessions, and even what happened at a 30th birthday for Postgres, complete with cake!

Cary Huang (High Go)

Your Agent Needs Better Context, Not a Bigger Prompt — Memory Engine stores engineering facts, decisions, and instructions in PostgreSQL so agents pull what's relevant before each task. No more loading the whole codebase. Semantic, keyword, temporal search. Inspectable, MCP-native. Free to start.

Memory Engine sponsor

🕒 How Soon is now()? — Did you know now() isn’t the 'current time' but when the transaction started? When that distinction matters, as it did for Oskar when a retry loop kept seeing the same frozen timestamp and never made progress, reach for clock_timestamp() instead.

Oskar Dudycz

5 Postgres Locking Behaviors That Trip People Up — Postgres’s lock manager is correct by design, but that correctness can still surprise you. A Postgres engineer walks through five counterintuitive locking behaviors that have caused real production outages, and how to avoid them.

Shinya Kato

XID Wraparound's Equally-Evil Twin — Monitoring transaction ID wraparound is a Postgres admin’s bread and butter, but MultiXact IDs, as consumed by concurrent row locks and foreign key checks, can fly completely under the radar. Richard explains how MXIDs accumulate, why they need freezing too, and shares queries to monitor them.

Richard Yen

pgGraph: Graph Database Capabilities for Normal Postgres Tables — An ‘early alpha’ extension that adds a graph querying layer to ordinary relational tables without a separate database or new query language (no Cypher to learn). It’s early days but has some interesting ideas. GitHub repo.

Evokoa

🔎 plpgsql_check 2.9: A PL/pgSQL Code Checker — A specialized tool to find errors lurking in PL/pgSQL functions.

Pavel Stehule

pg_parse: A Postgres-Compatible SQL Parser for Rust — Leans on libpg_query so you get the same internal parse tree for SQL queries that Postgres itself does.

Paul Mason