Bruce Momjian

This presentation highlights the challenges of motivating and managing an open source team of volunteers. Topics include motivation, communication, and project management. This talk is useful for anyone active in open source.

Home automation is an elusive technology — often desired, rarely achieved. This talk explores a successful ten-year home automation deployment, outlining the challenges that derail many attempts. It will cover technology choices, programing basics, and a dozen successful applications.

This presentation explains how open source software can live for a very long time, and covers the differences between proprietary and open source software life cycles. It also covers the increased adoption of open source, and many of the ways that Postgres is innovating to continue to be relevant.

Tls/ssl forms the backbone of secure digital communication. This presentation covers the details about the tls protocol and its use of lower-level cryptographic methods. There is also an extensive section about the creation and use of digital certificates for authentication, with examples from web servers and Postgres.

Postgres has been a vibrant project for decades, and probably will be popular for decades to come. However, as with any complex endeavor, challenges are always lurking. This talk explores the many project, competitive, and technical challenges in the future that could derail its success. By exploring these challenges, we will be better able to avoid them.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning are intertwined capabilities that attempt to solve problems that defy traditional computational solutions — problems include fraud detection, voice recognition, and search result recommendations. While they defy simple computation, they are computationally expensive, involving computation of perhaps millions of probabilities and weights. While these computations can be done outside of the database, there are specific advantages of doing machine learning inside the database, close to where the data is stored. This presentation explains how to do machine learning inside the Postgres database.

This presentation covers the history of various governing structures and why democracy provides superior results. It then explains that open source is a form of democracy, compared to the methods used by proprietary software producers. It covers the many benefits Postgres has enjoyed using an open development model, and how its future remains bright.

This presentation explains how cryptographic hardware allows the use of private keys while preventing them from being viewed or copied. It focuses primarily on the use of Yubikey cryptographic hardware, in both piv and gpg modes. It explains how to use this hardware with popular software like openssh and Postgres.

The optimizer is the "brain" of the database, interpreting SQL queries and determining the fastest method of execution. This talk uses the explain command to show how the optimizer interprets queries and determines optimal execution. The talk will assist developers and administrators in understanding how Postgres optimally executes their queries and what steps they can take to understand and perhaps improve its behavior.