Ultimate Guide to Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2022

Written by Claire Giordano
March 29, 2022

One of the good things with a virtual event like Citus Con is that you have a lot of flexibility about where and when to watch the talks. From your home office, or a café, or the beach—or even the car, while you wait to pick up your kids. As long as you have an internet connection, you’re in.

But you still need to figure out which talks and livestreams you want to watch when the event goes live on Tuesday, April 12. To help you out, we’ve created this guide to Citus Con: An Event for Postgres. And just for kicks I’m calling it the “Ultimate Guide” to CitusCon. (Ha! Since this is a first time event maybe it will be the only guide to Citus Con. Therefore definitely “ultimate”.)

In working on this event—I’m a co-chair along with Teresa Giacomini, also head of the talk selection team—I realized I had “tagged and categorized” each and every talk both in my head and on a spreadsheet. So that’s what this blog post will give you… a framework for knowing which talks are in which categories.

Of course, if you want to see the abstracts for all the talks, just pop over to the Schedule & Sessions page for Citus Con.

  • There’s a tab for all 18 of the “Live sessions”
  • Plus a tab for all 20 of the “On-demand sessions”
  • When you click on each of the talk titles the accordion opens up and you can see the detailed abstract plus the speaker’s bio, too.
  • Updated April 26, 2022: Videos for all 38 sessions are also available on the Schedule page

And please be sure to mark your calendar, either for the entire Citus Con event—or for the Americas, APAC, or EMEA livestream.

3 Keynotes, one for each of the Americas, APAC, and EMEA livestreams

Each of the 3 livestreams has one keynote talk, and we are oh so excited about each of these speakers and what they have to share with us. Let’s dive in:

  • The Building Blocks for Self-Driving PostgreSQL, by Andy Pavlo, the Professor of Databaseology in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. To kickoff the entire event, Andy will be keynoting the Americas livestream at 9:00am PDT on Tue April 12th. (Americas livestream, keynote, ML, self-driving, Postgres future)
  • 8 keys to the growth of Citus & Distributed PostgreSQL, by Umur Cubukcu who is head of the PostgreSQL and Citus PM team at Microsoft and former co-founder and CEO of Citus Data. Bonus points, Umur was also my boss for many years at Citus too! Umur will be keynoting the APAC livestream. (APAC livestream, keynote, startup growth)
  • PostgreSQL—more relevant than ever, by Magnus Hagander of the PostgreSQL core team. Magnus is often invited to give a talk on the latest release of PostgreSQL with his “look at the elephant’s trunk” talk series and while I love that talk, I’m eager to hear Magnus’s perspective on the relevance of Postgres. Magnus will keynote the EMEA livestream. (EMEA livestream, keynote, Postgres future)

Citus talks

You would expect to see talks about the Citus database at an event named Citus Con: An Event for Postgres. And sure enough, depending on how you categorize, about 11 or 12 of the 38 talks—about ~30%—are about the Citus extension to Postgres!

6 Citus customer talks

5 Citus engineering talks

3 Ecosystem talks

A few talks are about Postgres (or Citus) along with something else in the technology stack. Of course, no Postgres story lives in a vacuum, and every Postgres story is set in the context of a broader ecosystem. Somehow I felt that these Citus Con talks—with their focus on Django, or Hathi, or PostGIS, or MobilityDB—warranted their own ecosystem section.

Postgres talks

There are some talks I categorize as “general” talks, that should be interesting to all sorts of Postgres people. Think of these as big picture talks that should appeal to lots of people. Then there are some Postgres talks that dive pretty deep into nitty gritty details too: I’m classifying this second set as “deep dive” talks.

2 Postgres community talks

15 Postgres deep-dive talks

4 Azure Database for PostgreSQL talks—including customer talks too

This section includes talks about the managed service for PostgreSQL on Azure, including both customer talks and a talk by one of the PM experts about the new Flexible Server service.

Mark your calendars for Citus Con: An Event for Postgres

If any of these talks are useful to you we sure hope you join us on April 12th at this free and virtual developer event. No plane tickets required. 😊

Claire Giordano

Written by Claire Giordano

Head of open source community efforts for Postgres at Microsoft. Alum of Citus Data, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and Brown University CS. Conference speaker at PGConfEU, FOSDEM, PGConf NYC, Nordic PGDay, pgDay Paris, PGDay Chicago, Swiss PGDay, & Citus Con. Talk Selection Team chair for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres. Loves sailing in Greece.

@clairegiordano @clairegiordano@hachyderm.io clairegiordano