On February 4th, 2025, we had the PostgreSQL February Meetup in Berlin. This time Zalando hosted it again, and we did something big: two tracks, two lightning talks and four regular talks. Oh, and about 130 attendees. That is already a mini conference!
The Meetup took place in the Hedwig-Wachenheim-Straße in Berlin, right around the corner from the Uber Arena and East Side Gallery. Zalando has an office here, and the first floor is a large meeting and conference area.
Sergey Dudoladov from Zalando opened both tracks and had to switch between rooms a couple of times. Job well done.
Even printed schedules, like a real conference.
Bruce Momjian: Databases in the AI Trenches
Bruce is a very experienced speaker and well-known in the community. He offered to stop in Berlin on the way from FOSDEM.
He has a new talk about AI and PostgreSQL, which was well received.
Kaarel Moppel: Spot VMs and Postgres
Kaarel lives in Estonia and is a freelancer.
His talk is about finding and managing spot instances on hyperscalers, which is a great opportunity to save money. Usually spot instances are cheaper than a regular instance.
Pizza
Zalando ordered plenty of pizza - or so it looked. Turns out, 130 people are a lot, and almost all of the pizza was gone after the Meetup.
Oleksandr Shulgin: SQL: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Oleksandr presented a Lightning Talk about a few bad things and good things in the SQL language.
- Slides: SQL: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
- PostgreSQL Person of the Week interview with Oleksandr Shulgin
Felix Kunde: “Doing PostgreSQL as a service so nobody cares about Postgres. Oh no ?”
Felix gave a Lightning Talk about PostgreSQL as this service no one really bothers around, and yet it is there all the time.
- Slides: coming soon
Priyanka Chatterjee: Your Postgres DB performance Radar : pgBadger
Due to technical problems with the video system, the talk from Priancka had to be canceled.
Alexey Kondratov: Serverless PostgreSQL: the journey from ~1s startup time to 10s and back
Alexey told the audience about Neon which is a serverless PostgreSQL offering, and how they managed to greatly reduce the startup time for a server instance.
3D-printed elephant
Josef Machytka gave me a 3D-printed elephant which he made.
Thank you
The Meetup was organized by Sergey Dudoladov (Zalando). Thank you!
Speaking at a future Berlin PostgreSQL Meetup
The PostgreSQL Meetup group in Berlin exists since 2015, and currently has around 2100 members.
The Meetup group is always looking for speakers, and venues to host a Meetup.
If you are interested in either speaking about a PostgreSQL-related topic, or if your company is interested in hosting a Meetup, please contact the organizers.
A Meetup is an opportunity to test a talk in front of a smaller audience, before presenting it at a conference. There is no time limit at the Meetup, there is enough time for questions, and the feedback is more direct.
If you are unsure if your topic fits, let’s discuss. Here to help. We are also accepting Lightning Talks.
Getting there
The new Zalando BHW meeting space is very nice, and easy to reach by public transport. S-Bahn and U-Bahn Warschauer Straße is across the street. Cross the B96a, go into Tamara-Danz-Straße and after about 150 meters the office building is on the right side.
The address is: Hedwig-Wachenheim-Straße 7, 10243 Berlin
If you have time, the East-Side-Gallery is close by, as well as The Wall Museum.
Social Media profiles
The Berlin PostgreSQL Meetup is present on the following social media profiles:
- LinkedIn: PostgreSQL Meetup Berlin
- Mastodon: @postgresberlin@fosstodon.org
Please follow these accounts for more updates.
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