Interview with Divya Sharma

Talks

•  Understanding the impact of Materialized CTEs
•  Wednesday, 15:00
•  Zurich

Social Media

•  Twitter: @divyasharma0695
•  LinkedIn: divyasharma95
•  Blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/overview-of-security-best-practices-for-amazon-rds-for-postgresql-and-amazon-aurora-postgresql-compatible-edition/

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

Divya Sharma is a Sr. Database Specialist SA, working majorly on PostgreSQL. She has helped several customer’s migrate to AWS RDS PostgreSQL and Aurora PostgreSQL from commercial database engines. Her day to day role also involves helping customers optimise their PostgreSQL workloads on AWS. In her free time she likes to teach new tricks to her Labrador, Zoe.

How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?

Mainly through community email lists

Have you enjoyed previous PostgreSQL Europe conferences, either as an attendee or as a speaker? (PGConf.EU, FOSDEM PGDay, Nordic PGDay, pgDay Paris, PGConf.DE)

Attended Swiss PGDay 2022, and it was great. It is the first time for me as a speaker in pgconf, so I am both nervous and excited.

What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

Working at AWS helps me learn something new everyday. The topic for my talk is “Understanding the impact of Materialized CTEs”, and I will be discussing what are “Common Table Experessions”, what are the advantages of using them, and what is the impact of the MATERIALIZE keyword with such queries. The focus will also be what changes have been made in the execution of the CTEs from version 12 onwards.

The reason I chose this topic is because I found it interesting, and my customer was facing an issue with performance of CTEs when moving from version 11 to 13. It motivated me to understand the topic deeply, in order to help the customer with the optimization.

What is the audience for your talk?

Architects, Database Adminstrators, Developers

What is the one feature in PostgreSQL 15 which you like most?

“Remove PUBLIC creation permission on the public schema”

Which other talk at this year’s conference would you like to see?

There are many to be honest but here are a few I am most interested in :

• “Directing PostgreSQL to Performance: PostgreSQL Index improvements over time”
• “Performance tips you have never seen before”
• “Google AlloyDB vs. Amazon Aurora vs. Azure Hyperscale: comparison of databases build for clouds”
• “Time-series, PostgreSQL, and You”
• “Full Page Writes in PostgreSQL - Critical, Evil or Both - Why you should care and how to optimize”
• “Exploring Linux Memory Usage and IO Performance for PostgreSQL”

Which measure, action, feature or activity would—in your eyes—help to accelerate the adoption of PostgreSQL?

We already have a lot of conferences happening in all of Europe, however, if we publicise them better, we can reach a wider audience.

Another way could be to gather topics from postgresql users (maybe current conf attendees), as to which topics they would like to be discussed. This way we can incorporate their feedback, and also have a pool of topics ready for presenters.