At the conference I had the opportunity to present on Postgres within the context of the life sciences (discussed in the next section). And, altogether, I felt this conference had a nice diversity of talks: a selection that spanned Postgres core, its ecosystem, and beyond.
I’m confident that by the end, most if not all attendees left more enriched in some way relative to when they arrived.
Leading up to this event I had the honor of one of my talks being accepted. The title was “Postgres and Life Science: From Cells to Stars” and it was organized as a meta-analysis / homage to the extensibility of Postgres and its various applications to the natural world.
In order to best tell this story, I walked the audience through the following five topics of increasing scope:
I enjoyed putting together and presenting the talk, and there was nice discussion afterwards. Two points stood out in particular that I felt would be interesting to address here:
What three technologies (tools / workflows) would benefit most greatly, in terms of increased impact or adoptability, if their complexities were significantly reduced / abstracted away?
During my talk I made a claim that the brain was ACID compliant. While I was referring mostly to the action potentials of neurons, this was rightfully challenged.
1. What three technologies (tools / workflows) would benefit most greatly, in terms of increased impact or adoptability, if their complexities were significantly reduced / abstracted away?
Right out of the gate I thought about magnetic resonance scanner image classification. There’s quite a lot of conversation surrounding this topic within the medical community and there are plenty of startups in this space as well. My personal opinion is that there is momentum in the direction of accessibility, but there is still a strong separation between developer and end user. While I don’t know the answer at this point, I would look into pgvector and postgresml as a starting point. Due to this challenge’s involvement of vectors and machine learning, I would consider leveraging an image embedding service to turn the raw MRI output into a format that pgvector might be able to work with.
As a former academic, I can speak to the ubiquitousness of the common spreadsheet (.csv format being less common, but still utilized). What’s more is that files are typically stored in local directories / private server / shared infrastructure, but nevertheless a vanilla folder architecture. One can imagine the potential frictions as the conversation scales to include multiple researchers across multiple groups. Factor in a naturally high student turnover, paired with an “I like doing it my way” mentality, and one could appreciate the value of standards. While improvements could be approached from a number of different angles, I’d like to focus on data management and version control.
Tidy data and good organizational hygiene are hallmarks of success in any field of study. However, tracking changes are most often, if not exclusively limited to text documents. While it might be surprising to the reader, “code repository” is not part of the common academic lexicon. Even the term “Linux” evokes an air of “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” (Otto, 1923). With data security at the top of the mind, self hosted options such as forgejo could potentially benefit life scientists greatly - particularly if there are reservations about storing data online. Instead of having multiple file drafts, e.g., “draft-1_final”, “draft_final_final”, etc, tools such as forgejo can help track progress and give researchers more transparency into past changes (leading into easier cross-team collaboration).
Trust is a central topic in any field of research, and in certain circumstances, auditing (or otherwise some form of proof of work) may take center stage. In this case, Postgres and one of its companion extensions, pgaudit, can offer a nice step towards compliance. Due to Postgres’ capabilities, it can sometimes be viewed as intimidating and only suitable for large projects. I think there could be a lot of ubiquity with the publication of a “Postgres for small scale projects” type guide.
At the end of the day, no one will willingly use something unless they know it exists. That’s why discoverability is one of the most fundamental concepts when discussing impact and adoptability. It’s up to the maintainers, contributors, and communities behind these open source tools to share what they’re up to on multiple platforms, as well as different conferences. Honestly, the easiest way to help is to just talk about it and get hands-on.
2. During my talk I made a claim that the brain was ACID compliant. While I was referring mostly to the action potentials of neurons, this was rightfully challenged.
This was another exciting conversation in the post-presentation discussion, and while this really warrants its own blog post, I wanted to quickly share my thoughts. Within one of my slides, I made the claim that the brain is ACID compliant, at least in the sense of transactions being all-or-nothing. Neurons, which are a common cell type in the brain, have a characteristic whereby they receive signals which compile until a threshold is reached and then the neuron sends a signal of its own, or “fires.” This is a gross oversimplification: here’s a quick Wikipedia link for more information.
However, astute audience members righty noted that the brain is complex and has different regions. There is memory loss and there are activities that can alter function and consciousness. However, to what extent do external influences on the brain correspond to a database system? If something corrupts a Postgres database, it is no longer ACID compliant, but it was beforehand. All these points are both valid and interesting. It will be interesting to think on this and write a more formal response.
To sum things up, this was great conference. I know I speak for all attendees when I extend a thank you to all involved, whether they be staff, volunteers, speakers, or otherwise.
Foote, K. J., Grant, J. W. A., & Biron, P. M. (2024). A global dataset of salmonid biomass in streams. Scientific data, 11(1), 1172. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-04026-0
Giordano, C., & Hadjibagheri, P. (2021, December 11). UK COVID-19 dashboard built using Postgres and Citus for millions of users. Microsoft TechCommunity Blog. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/uk-covid-19-dashboard-built-using-postgres-and-citus-for/ba-p/3039052
Kazimiers, T., et al. (2021). CATMAID (Collaborative Annotation Toolkit for Massive Amounts of Image Data) [Computer software]. GitHub. https://github.com/catmaid/CATMAID
Krefl, D., & Nienartowicz, K. (2025, January 17). Harnessing Postgres and HPC for petabyte-scale variable star classification in astronomy [Conference presentation]. CERN PGDay 2025, Geneva, Switzerland. https://indico.cern.ch/event/1336647/contributions/5660229/
Otto, R. (1923). The idea of the holy: An inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational (J. W. Harvey, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1917)
Teixeira, A. de A., & PgHydro Project. (2022). pghydro (Version 6.6) [Computer software]. GitHub. https://github.com/pghydro/pghydro
Wikipedia contributors. (2025, May 16). Action potential. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential
]]>This was the first time that the Data Bene team attended the event, and we’re happy to share that it was a very positive experience.
As its name suggests, this conference takes place on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. For those who are less familiar, the Official Tourism Site provides a nice overview that you may refer to. While it should go without saying, this UNESCO World Heritage Site has incredible offerings outside of the conference itself. Combined with a potentially long-haul flight, it’s strongly recommended to plan an extra day or two (or more) to explore the island and enjoy the local experience.
The event itself is hosted at the Palacio de Congresos de Ibiza; a two-story conference center with multiple rooms and catering. Though located outside of the capital city, the venue can be reached by car in good timing (~15 minutes). To add, the venue is situated within walking distance of numerous hotels, restaurants, and a beach! We happened to have stayed at Hotel Tres Torres, which we can recommend, though admittedly it’s difficult to make a wrong decision, especially following a sprinkle of background research.
Briefly, on the topic of extracurriculars, our go-to recommendation would be to visit the capital city, Ibiza. There you will be able to find a surprisingly large amount of shopping, restaurants, and sightseeing. Adding to that a walk through the historic neighborhood and you’ve got quite the memorable experience.
This year’s PGIBZ welcomed about 30-40 attendees from across the globe, including China and the United States. And while there are certainly two sides to the coin, I consider this group size as more of a positive. Indeed, during both the presentation Q/A sessions, as well as the coffee breaks, I felt interactions were more engaging overall. This was especially true when meeting and reconnecting with members of both more modest and global enterprise-scaled companies.
The first of the Data Bene speakers, and indeed the keynote of the first day, was Catherine Bouxin. Her presentation addressed the environmental impact of technology, and reflected the philosophy that important topics are not always the ones being discussed, and often aren’t considered a concern at all! Indeed, Catherine framed this conversation primarily as a reminder of the responsibility we as PostgreSQL community members share. There have been many exciting inventions of late, some with societal-changing implications, but we can not ignore the resource intensity that many of them require.
We stand confidently with Catherine’s message about contributing towards a greener future and making thoughtful decisions to this end, and we are excited that this was very well-received by the audience.
On second day, our founder and CEO, Cédric Villemain, presented on the statistics-based highlights of the PostgreSQL major release version 18 (official notes linked here). (After the event, he created a blog post on the topic of Cumulative Statistics in Postgres 18 - check it out here!) Our team here at Data Bene are a fan of stats and surfacing data, which is what led us to create the PostgreSQL extension, StatsMgr. If you previously missed information on StatsMgr and would like to learn more, check out our previous blog and Postgres Café podcast episode on the topic.
Directly after Cedric, I had the opportunity to present on developing and maintaining a Rust-based PostgreSQL extension (currently still very early stage) that helps facilitate the transition from Oracle to PostgreSQL. This project, named pgtap_gen, leverages the pre-existing pgTAP project to automate unit test creation on IvorySQL (100% open-source forked PostgreSQL with Oracle-analogous components). It was very encouraging to hear audience engagement and feedback. What’s more, it feels great to participate in the PostgreSQL ecosystem, even if it’s for proof-of-concept initiatives!
Towards the end of the second day, Frédéric delievered a talk on transaction isolation levels in PostgreSQL (that you may get the chance to see later on, as he’s submitted the same talk to pgDay Paris 2026 and PGDay CERN 2026!). He delved into each isolation level in Postgres with practical examples, and explained how everything works behind the scenes to define real steps for confidently choosing the right level for the right context. The attendees seemed to find the talk interesting and educational, so we may yet see further content on this topic and similar to help others who missed the opportunity to learn about the subject.
We chose to sponsor and attend PGIBZ 2025 as we believe it is important to further the PostgreSQL community across the world. No matter what, this is an event that is seeking to further Postgres education for the better. Profits from the event are used by the parent nonprofit organization, PostgreSQL España, to invest in translations of the official PostgreSQL documentation into Spanish.
Further breakdowns of each of the talk topics mentioned above are in-the-works; feel free to follow us on LinkedIn and Mastodon to keep an eye out for them when they’re published on our blog.
We very much enjoyed our time at PGIBZ 2025, and are honored to have had the opportunity to present and participate. Looking forward to returning next year!