Schedule - PostgreSQL Development Conference 2024

How Postgres is misused and abused in the wild

Date: 2024-05-29
Time: 13:30–14:20
Room: Fletcher(1900)
Level: Intermediate

People never cease to amaze me with the unexpected and imaginative ways they come up with to misuse the various tools in the Postgres ecosystem. Of course, as a Solutions Architect, I try to steer them gently back on course, but there are usually lessons to be learnt from the things they’re trying to do.

Maybe the tool the they're using doesn’t have the functionality they want or need, so they implement a workaround.

Maybe the functionality they need actually does exist, but they couldn’t find the information they needed in the documentation.

Perhaps a different tool would actually be a better choice, but the customer wasn’t aware it existed.

Sometimes, the behaviour the user's looking for is a really, really bad idea and that’s why the functionality doesn’t exist.

I’ll recount some of the (mis)use-cases I’ve come across, not just for amusement purposes, but so we can look at the real-world ways in which people are using Postgres, and how we can take lessons from that to improve the tools in the Postgres ecosystem.

Talk recorded at https://youtu.be/rA4J3kr-uhE.