PGIBZ 2025: An Event for the Postgres Community in Ibiza
Postgres Ibiza (PGIBZ): An open source conference designed to bring together people with a love for PostgreSQL in Ibiza, a relaxed place for fresh and innovative discussions. An international event run by the nonprofit PostgreSQL España.
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.
The Conference
Location and Venue
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.
Attendance
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.
Presentations from our team
Catherine
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.
Cedric
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.
Evan
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!
Frédéric
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.
Concluding Thoughts
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!