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Speaker photo for Jaime Casanova

Interview with Jaime Casanova

Talks

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Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Jaime Casanova and I’m starting my 40’s.

I’m from Ecuador, a little country in South America, a nice place to visit with beaches and highlands, jungles and big cities too… especially I will recommend anyone to visit the Galapagos Islands. I’m also a Chilean citizen because of my dad and have a little percentage of Italian blood because of my mom’s grandfather.

I have 18 years working and contributing with PostgreSQL, at least half of them leading the Ecuador branch of 2ndQuadrant. After EDB’s acquisition of 2ndQ, we reverted to our original name of SYSTEMGUARDS, of which I am the CEO, a PostgreSQL support company that specializes in spanish language support, consultancy and training.

I was the original developer of repmgr (most of the basic architecture came from Simon Riggs), but I must admit I have taken distance from the development side of it after v2. I have since worked a lot with wal and replication (for in-core functionality, extensions or just solving customers’ strange problems).

How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?

I like to go to PostgreSQL conferences and participate in postgresql’s mailing lists and a spanish language telegram support channel.

I would like to use the opportunity to say we (people from some companies are involved in the planning of this) are planning a coordinated series of conferences in LatinAmerica for 2023, we expect that people from Europe can schedule 10 days or so and visit some or all of these, and hopefully a pgConf at Mexico for 2024.

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 pgconf.eu 2014, but most of the conferences I assist are in the Americas.

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

My talk is “The curious case of the point of sales, and why we still need pglogical”.

Ecuador is an “in-development” country, which means that our infrastructure is not as good as we would like. That also means that we cannot always use ideal solutions that depend heavily on the reliability of networks or can be very expensive.

In this context, we will show how a drugstore company solved the problem allowing the least favored to have easy access to lower cost medicines.

Also I will add a section to understand what native logical replication needs to be a complete replacement of pglogical 2 for this specific case.

What is the audience for your talk?

Everyone interested in logical replication. Contra indication: People that have strict ideas about multiple origin solutions without a proper conflict resolution could be severely harmed by this talk

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

Basic understanding of how PostgreSQL replication works

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

All the work done to improve partitioning and native logical replication, MERGE command, and the different compression options… I can keep counting…

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

There are a lot of talks in the schedule that I’m interested in, but one that attracted me the most is the one about CYPEX. I think a way to quickly develop applications based on postgres is something needed for improve the adoption of postgres.

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

IMHO, allowing a way to have community-approved certifications instead of company based ones.