Citus Blog

A year ago we renamed the Talking Postgres podcast—and just published our 29th episode. Since it’s a monthly thing, that means 13 new conversations in the past year. So this feels like a good moment to pause, reflect, and share a few highlights.

If you’re already a listener, this post might help you find an episode you missed. If you’re new to the podcast, think of this as a sampler: a few favorite quotes, some backstory, and quick-hit summaries of each episode from the past year.

What is the Talking Postgres podcast? It's a long-form conversation—usually an hour, often more—with people in the Postgres world. We talk about what they do with Postgres, why they do it, and how they got started. (I’m a bit obsessed with origin stories.)

The show isn’t about features or how-to’s. It’s not about speeds and feeds. And it’s definitely not trying to sell you anything. It’s about the people behind Postgres—and what we can learn from each other.

POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 is back for its 4^th year—free, virtual, and packed with deep expertise. No travel needed, just your laptop, internet, and curiosity.

This year’s 45 speakers are smart, capable Postgres practitioners—core contributors, performance experts, application developers, Azure engineers, extension maintainers—and their talks are as interesting as they are useful.

The four livestreams (42 talks total) run from June 10-12, 2025. Every talk will be posted to YouTube afterward (un-gated, of course). But if you can join live, I hope you do! On the virtual hallway track on Discord, you’ll be able to chat with POSETTE speakers—as well as other attendees. And yes, there will be swag.

This “ultimate guide” blog post is your shortcut to navigating POSETTE 2025. In this post you’ll get:

• A “by the numbers” summary
• 2 Amazing Keynotes
• 18 Postgres core talks
• 12 Postgres ecosystem talks
• 10 Azure Database for PostgreSQL talks
• Where to find the POSETTE Schedule
• How to watch & how to participate on Discord
• What’s new in POSETTE 2025?
• A big thank you to our 45 amazing speakers
• Join us for POSETTE 2025 & mark your calendars

The Citus 13.0 release is out and includes PostgreSQL 17.2 support! We know you’ve been waiting, and we’ve been hard at work adding features we believe will take your experience to the next level, focusing on bringing the Postgres 17 exciting improvements to you at distributed scale.

The Citus database is an open-source extension of Postgres that brings the power of Postgres to any scale, from a single node to a distributed database cluster. Since Citus is an extension, using Citus means you're also using Postgres, giving you direct access to the Postgres features. And the latest of such features came with Postgres 17 release! In addition, Citus 13 will be made available on the elastic clusters (preview) feature on Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server, along with PostgreSQL 17 support, in the near future.

PostgreSQL 17 highlights include performance improvements in query execution for indexes, a revamped memory management system for vacuum, new monitoring and analysis features, expanded functionality for managing data in partitions, optimizer improvements, and enhancements for high-concurrency workloads. PostgreSQL 17 also expands on SQL syntax that benefits both new workloads and mission-critical systems, such as the addition of the SQL/JSON JSON_TABLE() command for developers, and the expansion of the MERGE command. For those of you who are interested in upgrading to Postgres 17 and scaling these new features of Postgres: you can upgrade to Citus 13.0!

Along with Postgres 17 support, Citus 13.0 also fixes important bugs, and we are happy to say that we had many community contributions here as well. These bugfixes focus on data integrity and correctness, crash and fault tolerance, and cluster management, all of which are critical for ensuring reliable operations and user confidence in a distributed PostgreSQL environment.

Let's take a closer look at what's new in Citus 13.0:

Some of you have been asking for advice about what to submit to the CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025. So this post aims to give you ideas that might help you submit a talk proposal (or 2, or 3) before the upcoming CFP deadline.

If you’re not yet familiar with this conference, POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 is a free & virtual developer event now in its 4th year, organized by the Postgres team at Microsoft.

I love the virtual aspect of POSETTE because the conference talks are so accessible—for both speakers and attendees. If you’re a speaker, you don’t need travel budget $$—and you don’t have to leave home. Also, the talk you’ve poured all that energy into is not limited to the people in the room, and has the potential to reach so many more people. If you’re an attendee, well, all you need is an internet connection.

The CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres will be open until Sunday Feb 9th at 11:59pm PST. So as of the publication date of this blog post, you still have time to submit a CFP proposal (or 2, or 3, or 4)—and to remind your Postgres teammates and friends of the speaking opportunity.

The TL;DR of this blog post is simple: the “Path To Citus Con” podcast for developers who love Postgres has been renamed—and the new name is Talking Postgres.

And if you’re just hearing about the Talking Postgres podcast for the first time, it is a monthly podcast for developers who love Postgres, with amazing guests from the Postgres world who talk about the human side of Postgres, databases, and open source.

Listening to the Talking Postgres podcast is the next best thing to being in the hallway at a Postgres conference, eavesdropping on other people’s conversations and learning from the experiences of experts. As Floor Drees says, it’s as if you’re sharing a coffee with them.

Past podcast guests include (in order of appearance) some amazing Postgres, database, and open source people such as:

Now in its 3rd year, POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024 is not only bigger than previous years but some of my Postgres friends who are speakers tell me the event is even better than past years. Sweet.

Formerly called Citus Con (yes, we did a rename), POSETTE is a free and virtual developer event happening Jun 11-13 that is chock-full of Postgres content—with 4 livestreams, 42 talks, and 44 speakers.

And while POSETTE is organized by the Postgres team here at Microsoft, there is a lot of PG community involvement. For example, 31 of the 44 speakers (~70%) are from outside Microsoft! We have also tried to be quite transparent about the talk selection process used for POSETTE 2024, if you’re curious.

On the schedule, the add to calendar links (in upper right of each livestream's tab) are quite useful for blocking your calendar—and the calendar appointments include a link to where you can watch the livestreams on the POSETTE site.

So what exactly is on the schedule for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024? A lot! When you look at the schedule page, be sure to check out all 4 tabs, so you don’t miss all the unique talks in Livestreams 2, 3, and 4.

As promised in the CFP for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024, all of the talk selection decisions were emailed out on April 17^th. Our talk selection work has now concluded, with the possible exception of accepting proposals from the Reserve list.

So what’s next? First I want to thank all of you Postgres people who submitted such amazing talk proposals into the CFP for POSETTE, now in its 3rd year. I was so impressed by the submissions and wish we could have accepted more of them.

And I also want to thank Alicja Kucharczyk, Daniel Gustafsson, and Melanie Plageman from POSETTE’s Talk Selection Team for contributing their time and expertise to collaborate with me to select the talks for this year’s virtual POSETTE event. It’s not easy to carefully read through and review 184 talk proposals—in just 8 days—to come up with the program for an event like #PosetteConf.

That’s right, 184 talk proposals—from 120 unique speakers. (The CFP had a maximum of 4 submissions per speaker.) With just 38 talks to accept this year, that means POSETTE 2024 has a ~20% talk acceptance rate. Bottom line, we had some difficult decisions to make.

PgBouncer is probably the most popular connection pooler for Postgres. It is essentially a transparant middleware between clients and the server. However, it is not %100 transparent in practice. There are a few intricacies that should be taken into account when using PgBouncer. One such consideration is that PgBouncer does not support the use of all session variables in transaction pooling mode. This lack of support is one of the reasons that the most commonly used transaction pooling mode is not fully compatible with Postgres. PgBouncer 1.20.0 started supporting two of the most requested session variables and laid ground work to be able to support all session variables in the future. Let’s break this down further.

The Impact of Pooling Mode on Postgres Compatibility

A connection pooler between the client and the server should ideally be completely transparent such that your application doesn’t have to be aware of the presence of a connection pooler. This is not the case with PgBouncer for all the pooling modes.

There are three different connection pooling modes:

• Session
• Transaction
• Statement

The pooling mode determines how the connections in the pool are assigned to the clients. The way this is done may impose some limitations impacting Postgres compatibility.

In session pooling mode, there is a one-to-one mapping between the client and the pooled server connection throughout the lifetime of the client connection.

Hence session pooling mode is the most compatible mode with Postgres. The clients can use session variables which are Postgres parameters whose values can be set per session.

The tl;dr of this post is that the CFP is open until April 7th 2024 for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, the free & virtual developer event brought to you with 🧡 by our Postgres team at Microsoft. Formerly called Citus Con.

If you have a Postgres experience, learning, epiphany, story, failure, best practice, “how-to”, collection of tips, lesson about what’s new, or success story to share—not just about the core of Postgres, but about anything in the rich Postgres ecosystem, including extensions—please consider submitting a talk proposal into the CFP for POSETTE.

Whether you are new to public speaking or a regular on the Postgres conference circuit, we’d love to hear your stories about Postgres. Before the CFP deadline of Sunday April 7th at 11:59pm PDT, of course.

When I think about naming something—like a feature or product or even an event—this quote always comes to mind.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

–William Shakespeare

What’s in a name, after all? I’m no expert on Romeo and Juliet, but friends tell me Shakespeare’s point was that names don’t matter. The thing itself is the thing itself, regardless of the name.

My parents named my sister “Helen” at birth but never actually called her that. They always called her by a nickname, “Lyena”. So my sister’s sense of self became intertwined with her nickname: she “felt” like a Lyena. And the only people that ever called her Helen were officious school principals, gate-check agents looking at her passport—and our paternal grandfather. It made her so mad. Whenever my grandfather insisted on calling her Helen, you could almost see the steam coming out of my sister’s ears.

My husband told me about a thing I’ve unconsciously done for years: whenever we drive through Suisun City en route to the mountains, I say the name of the city out loud to myself. Not just once but several times, like I’m chewing on the word. Turns out I really like the way it feels when I say “Suh-soon-si-tee” out loud.

Names carry meaning. They trigger emotions. The phonetic sound of a word affects whether you can remember it. And some words just “roll off the tongue” in a way that makes it easy to say and easy to remember. Bottom line, names matter.

Which is why we decided to give “Citus Con: An Event for Postgres” a new name. People had told us that when they heard the event’s nickname of “Citus Con” they thought it was only about Citus—and did not realize that over 66% of last year’s Citus Con talks were about Postgres, and not about Citus.

Say hello to POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, now in its 3rd year. A free and virtual developer event brought to you with 🧡 by the Postgres team here at Microsoft.