2025-09-10 –, Room 7
Language: English
PostgreSQL is widely recognized for its standards compliance and ability to efficiently manage large-scale datasets. However, one of its most powerful—but often overlooked—features is its support for diverse data types and remarkable extensibility.
In this hands-on workshop, we’ll begin with an overview of PostgreSQL’s core capabilities for data modeling and analytical querying. Then, we’ll dive deeper into some of the more advanced and lesser-known features that make PostgreSQL a robust platform for modern data analytics.
This workshop will explore both foundational and advanced analytics capabilities in PostgreSQL, including:
* Advanced Aggregation Techniques – Explore PostgreSQL’s capabilities for flexible grouping, conditional aggregation, and analyzing patterns across subsets of data to support complex analytical workflows.
* Graph Queries Using Adjacency Lists and Recursive Common Table Expressions – Learn how to represent and query graph structures using standard SQL.
* Hierarchical Data with Nested Sets – Explore techniques for efficiently modeling tree-like structures.
* Full-Text Search – Harness PostgreSQL’s built-in text search capabilities for powerful, language-aware queries.
* Trigram Indexing – Leverage similarity measures and fast text search with fuzzy matching and regular expressions.
* Vectors and Indexing for Machine Learning – Work with PostgreSQL’s vector data types and indexing methods for ML workflows.
Tobias Bussmann came into contact with PostgreSQL in the early 2000s and became an enthusiast the more he has been involved with the product and the community since then.
Tobias is inaugural member and current treasurer of the Swiss PostgreSQL Users Group and part of the organization committee of the annual Swiss PGDay. He is co-maintainer of PostgresApp, an official PostgreSQL distribution for macOS.
You will likely have a chance to meet him at various community events and conferences. For a living, he is working as a Software Engineer at the Swiss Academy of Sciences in Bern, Switzerland, where he lives.
Johannes Graën has over 20 years of experience working with PostgreSQL, spanning both commercial and scientific applications. He has designed and implemented complex systems built around PostgreSQL databases and has worked extensively as a developer and part-time database administrator. He has also shared his knowledge at various PostgreSQL conferences.
Johannes holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Zurich, where he currently supports researchers with technical solutions — many of them involving PostgreSQL.