 Hey everybody, this is Jeff Kelly. My guest is JD, who is the co-chair of PostgresConf, where we're recording from today. JD, welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. So for those who unfortunately couldn't make it to the conference, tell us a little bit about what's happening today, how the conference is going. Well, the conference is actually going a lot better than we expected to be honest. That's always good. It is an all-volunteer effort, so sometimes you have to kind of skimp on corners. But what's going on is we are the largest Postgres conference in North America. We run for five days. Earlier in the week we did training and today we started a regulated industry summit and we're running breakout sessions throughout the rest of the week. Great. And talk a little bit about the community itself. What kind of people do you get into the community or here this week learning more about Postgres? Well, we're actually fairly diverse. A lot of tech conferences you go to are tailored towards, say, a DevOps person or a C-level executive, whereas we get the entire range because we'll get system administrators who are doing deployments, we'll get developers who are doing application development, we get sponsors and C-level executives that are looking for talent, things like that. How would you describe the growth of the community over the years? Not just in pure numbers, but in terms of the types of people that are part of the community and the role they play in shepherding the technology. It's been around for a while. Postgres has been around for a number of years. So give us a little bit of historical context. Okay. Well, Postgres as a whole, if you follow the tree all the way back, started way back with University of California, Ingress. We don't have to go through the whole tree. But the current iteration of Postgres started around 1997. And the community is basically made up of two sides. You have your community contributors. These are your developers. These are your advocates. These are the people that are working directly with the people that are actually building the software. And then we have our user community. And the user community is primarily what you'll see here as attendees. So a lot of our speakers are contributors and developers and DBAs. And then the users are people who are using Postgres in their production life, whether it be at their company or within their own consulting gig, things like that. And in terms of the database market, we're an interesting spot now. I think if you were to talk about database market 10 years ago, it wasn't particularly exciting per se. But I think with open source, we've seen a lot of developments, interesting developments around the commercial use of technology, commercial use of databases. What's the relationship like, I guess generally speaking, between open source communities and the vendors that are trying to commercialize those products. And specifically in the Postgres community, how do you interact with the vendors? Well, that's actually a great question because that gets into the whole idea behind open source licensing. So some products, they're licensed under the GPL license, which doesn't allow closing of it or selling of licenses to, you know, of another product. You know, an example would be MySQL, right? MySQL is GPL. It's got a great user base. But if you want to close it, you have to buy a license for it. Whereas with Postgres, we're BSD licensed. We're technically Postgres licensed, but it is a BSD style license, which means essentially do whatever you want with it. You just can't sue us. And because of that, you start seeing some really fascinating products being developed. You know, some of the early pioneers would have been in Green Plum with Pivotal and Enterprise DB, where they have taken, you know, Postgres and added features to it. They keep some of the features, but then they contribute a lot back to the community. And now with how mature Postgres has become, you start seeing other companies starting to use it for things that you wouldn't expect. For example, Timescale, they're using it for time series data, but they don't actually have a database. They have a product that is built on Postgres that actually couldn't run on anything else because of how Postgres is built, but they didn't have to worry about building the database part. They only had to worry about building their features. It allows the ecosystem to grow that way. And what makes for a good community member, both from an individual perspective and also from a vendor perspective? Is it all about contributing back to the project? Well, I don't think contributing back to the project is great. I mean, and we all should. I mean, I'm a big proponent of, you know, if you got this for free, does it really kill you to maybe do, even if it's just a grammar edit in our documentation, right? It doesn't have to be anything big. But you can contribute in a lot of ways. For example, user groups. If you're in a town with any kind of Postgres presence running user group, all you got to do is get together, drink some beer, have some pizza and have a presenter once a month, right? That is a very easy way to contribute to the community. The other thing, obviously, you can give code. And that is extremely valuable because it allows us to increase the usage of, you know, the database. Other ways is the conference. You know, this conference is all volunteer. It is non-profit. You know, we're not here making oodles of money. We're here trying to grow and support the Postgres community internally and externally so that businesses feel better about using the open-source software, right? Because it's part of providing the infrastructure. By having mature conference series, good educational capabilities, you're enabling people to learn the software, thus jobs with the software. If you can find talent for the software, businesses feel better because then they don't wonder who's going to take care of this. That's not the thing. Yeah, and I'm curious, what has it been like as open-source software has become more of a given in the enterprise? Where years ago it was certainly the exception. Where now you're seeing open-source use in all types of enterprises, even highly regulated companies, banks, financial institutions, has that kind of lifted all boats, including Postgres? Yeah, I mean, obviously Linux is the pioneer that people will know even though it was not by any stretch of the imagination the first one. But Linux was first and because as people started to know and trust Linux, other software came along and then of course with the explosion of web technologies, all web technologies need some sort of database. That's helped Postgres as well because it helps grows the support community. So talk a little bit more about the conference itself in terms of you mentioned it's all volunteer, so you've got a big job. It's like imagine it's like herding cats in some cases. Talk about some of your challenges and how you tackle them. So the biggest challenge is that it is all volunteer. So, you know, for example, for the last year I've spent probably half time prepping for this conference and then you also run into a situation where a lot of support companies will allow their people to volunteer but that takes away from their ability to get their work done and then they get limited in, you know, what they can actually do. The volunteers for the organization isn't too difficult because we've been around long enough to where we always have the same organization team, but one of the logistical issues is who's going to run registration, right? We have 600 people show up at eight o'clock in the morning, all pretty much within 15-20 minutes. We got to get them out the door so that you know people aren't falling all over each other and things like that and that's where we do things like we reached out to women who code. We offer, you know, scholarships and if you know they can come and go to talks and they just need to fill a small slot and help us get some of the things done. And is there a is there a theme, a guiding theme of this year's conference? Are there certain things that are really kind of top of mind in terms of presentations and the keynotes and things like that? Actually, yes. Our slogan is people Postgres data. So it doesn't, every talk, every presentation, every training, every workshop, anything that we're doing has to fall within is it about people? Is it about Postgres or is it about data? We don't stretch from that. And that allows us to build individuals, help them with their professional careers. Hopefully we'll start having internships in the future. It helps with Postgres because we get all of our sponsors to show up. They get to exhibit, you know, the technologies that they're using, which in turn goes back to helping people. And then, of course, Postgres is a database. So it also has to do with data. We won't necessarily turn away content or workshops just because it's not Postgres specific. So that's why Green Plum is here, because it is about data. Got it. Last question, looking forward, what do you hope to accomplish, let's say, in the next year, the next couple of years in terms of the community, the conference? What are some of the things on your agenda? Well, my agenda specifically with running the conferences with the people Postgres data is to educate anyone who attends that they are a potential contributor. They can give back to the community and there's so many ways to do it. Because the only way that a community stays strong is if you bring in new community members. We all get older, we all change jobs, some have kids, can't give as much anymore. And that's like a real challenge within the community because if we don't replace those resources, the community will start to starve itself out. And so this conference brings together all kinds of companies that was, oh, you know what, maybe I should give back some code, or maybe I should sponsor next year or have a diversity scholarship so someone can come, something like that. Great. So if you're watching and you're a Postgres user or you just like data and you're not here at this conference this year, make sure you put it on your calendar for next year and take part in the community. JD, thanks so much for taking the time. I'll let you get back to the conference. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.