Interview with Henrietta Dombrovskaya
Talks
- Changelog vs Two-dimensional time - what works better?
- Wednesday, 11:10
- Berlin 2+3
- Breaking the sound barrier - Applications at light speed
- Friday, 11:50
- Zurich
Social Media
- Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I have worked with databases throughout my professional career, starting from my sophomore year at the university, which is 39 years at the moment. I started before relational databases became the industry standard and then worked with almost all of the major RDBMS’. I transitioned to PostgreSQL in 2011 and have worked almost exclusively with Postgres since then. Starting this month I am a Database Architect at DRW.
- How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?
My personal projects with Postgres include the support for two-dimensional time.
NORM - the set of functions to simplify communications between databases and applications.
And postgres_air - the largest open-source PostgreSQL database.
- 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)
I was a speaker at Nordic PG Day 2022 and attended pg Day Paris - both were great! I never attended PG Conf. EU before, and I am very much looking forward to it!
- What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?
My first talk will be about incorporating time dimensions into Postgres. I’ve worked on the pg_bitemporal project for many years, and although I know a couple of successful implementations, people often say that “it is difficult” and “nobody needs it.” I became hopeful after Stonebreaker’s keynote at Postgres Vision. In my talk, I will demonstrate the advantages of the bitemporal model compared with the often-proposed changelog.
The second talk is a joint talk with Jan Karremans from EBD. Both of us are passionate about improving overall application performance, and both believe that, most often, the root cause of the problem is ORIM - Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch. However, our approaches to solving this problem are a little bit different. In this talk, we will highlight the shared ideas and implementation differences.
- What is the audience for your talk?
Both talks are primarily geared towards database and application developers, but anybody interested in the abovementioned topics can attend.
- What existing knowledge should the attendee have?
There are no specific knowledge requirements except for general Postgres knowledge on a medium level.
- What is the one feature in PostgreSQL 15 which you like most?
The right to create objects in the public schema is revoked from
public!!- Which other talk at this year’s conference would you like to see?
I would love to listen to ALL the talks, but unfortunately, I can’t clone myself! As I already pointed out, the schedule is impossible!
- Which measure, action, feature or activity would—in your eyes—help to accelerate the adoption of PostgreSQL?
Usually, when we want to persuade somebody to move from a legacy RDBMS to Postgres, we say that “you do not need to change anything in your code, and there is no licensing fee.” This works to a certain extent, but later, many people express disappointment citing “Postgres needs more resources” and “is not fast enough.” None of these statements is true, but to avoid this disappointment, we should clearly point to the differences, not the similarities. Postgres wins when users utilize Postgres-specific features, and we should do a better job highlighting what Postgres can do that other databases can’t.