Robert Haas: PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop - December 2024

Next month, I'll be hosting a discussion of Melanie Plageman's talk, Intro to Postgres Planner, given at PGCon 2019. You can sign up using this form. To be clear, the talk is not an introduction to how the planner works from a user perspective, but rather how to hack on it and try to make it better and perhaps get your improvements committed to PostgreSQL. If you're interested, please join us. I anticipate that both Melanie and I will be present for the discussions.

We're only going to be having two sessions this month rather than the usual three. There are two reasons for that. First, many people will be taking substantial time off for Christmas, or just to use up their vacation time at the end of the year, so I thought that we might get lower attendance, especially if the sessions start to creep into the second half of the month. Second, I've been scheduling the third session at 0300 UTC in attempt to cover all time zones, but that slot has proved to be considerably less popular than the other two. It does have one huge fan (hi Paul, and sorry!) but it seems like most attendees are from Europe, western Asia, or the eastern United States. I do plan to experiment a bit more with the scheduling in future months; for example, I might schedule two sessions that are more or less "guaranteed" and then one or two extras that are dependent on signups. But for this month, we're just going to have two.

In my entirely subjective opinion, we've started to have really good discussions. Some sessions go better than others, but a really good number of very knowledgeable people are showing up, which is very cool to see. Some of these people are existing PostgreSQL hackers, but interestingly, some of them are people who seem to know quite a bit about databases in general and have sophisticated comments or questions about the talk, but who are not PostgreSQL hackers. Whether any of those people will feel inspired to become PostgreSQL hackers remains to be seen; and there is the danger that the existing hackers will have so much to say that the new people will feel crowded out of the conversation. I'm not sure, yet, how we'll manage that. As we creep closer to the 20-person limit that I've set for these calls, it becomes more difficult to make sure that everyone is included.

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