How Postgres is Misused and Abused in the Wild
I've spent my career so far working/playing with databases (exclusively PostgreSQL for several years now). I'm currently a Senior Solutions Architect and I'm on the PostgreSQL Europe board of directors. I mainly use this space to publish links to the slides and recordings of my (PostgreSQL database) conference talks.
This post contains the slides from the talk that I gave at PGConf.dev in Vancouver a few weeks ago, together with the transcript and other information. This is my new approach to sharing slides, inspired by Simon Willison's annotated presentations. You can also watch the video here. Background I initially thought that I didn't have anything to share at a PostgreSQL development conference because I'm not a Postgres developer. On reflection, I realised that I get a lot of insights from seeing what my customers and other users are doing, or trying to do, with Postgres. We can learn lessons from these insights to help us make Postgres, its extensions and related tools even better.
Talk Abstract People never cease to amaze me with the unexpected and imaginative ways they come up with to misuse the various tools in the Postgres ecosystem. Of course, as a Solutions Architect, I try to steer them gently back on course, but there are usually lessons to be learnt from the things they’re trying to do. Maybe the tool the they're using doesn’t have the functionality they want or need, so they implement a workaround. Maybe the functionality they need actually does exist, but they couldn’t find the information they needed in the documentation. Perhaps a different tool would actually be a better choice, but the user wasn’t aware it existed. Sometimes, the behaviour the user's looking for is a really, really bad idea and that’s why the functionality doesn’t exist. I’ll recount some of the (mis)use-cases I’ve come across, not (just) for amusement purposes, but so we can look at the real-world ways in which people are using Postgres, and how we can take lessons from that to improve the tools in the Postgres ecosystem. So, let's talk about how Postgres is misused and abused in the wild:
