PGConf.Russia 2025

In this talk, we will discuss what character encodings and collations are. I will explain the issues that can arise from sorting (COLLATION) in databases and show how these problems can be addressed using the COLLATION PROVIDER = ICU feature in PostgreSQL.

So much has been said about PostgreSQL as the result of its program code. But Postgres is not just code. It’s the people who create it, develop it, and... leave a piece of themselves through comments.

What stories can we uncover from the comments in PostgreSQL’s code? We’ll discover what the most popular word is, which comments have been in the code since the very first public commit, how the style of communication has evolved with the product, and how we can see the human side behind the lines of code and comments.

In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, PostgreSQL has emerged as a popular choice for organizations seeking to leverage the power of open-source databases while maintaining scalability, performance, and flexibility. 

As enterprises migrate from proprietary database systems like Oracle to PostgreSQL, developers face the challenge of adapting existing PL/SQL codebases to PL/pgSQL. Despite the similarities between these two procedural languages, significant differences in their syntax, performance characteristics, and ecosystem features require a thoughtful approach to migration and optimization. 

This session will focus on highlighting the key differences between Oracle’s PL/SQL and PostgreSQL’s PL/pgSQL, providing actionable insights on how to efficiently navigate these differences during migration. A deep dive will be taken into critical areas including compilation methodology, Code Debugging , Exception Handling, work_mem , Bulk Load and more.

This talk will likely be of interest to network providers who can enhance their cool features by adding something to the syntax to simplify administration, as well as anyone interested in machine learning. We will explore the SQL parsing mechanism, what, where, and how to modify it in order to introduce new syntax constructs. Additionally, I will demonstrate the capabilities of machine learning on tabular data, all within the database, using the new syntax.