Last Updated on January 31, 2026 by Triumphoid Team
Last week, the Triumphoid team attended Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day 2026 (P2D2)—January 27-28 at ČVUT FIT. Being based in Prague ourselves, it was a rare opportunity to attend a world-class database engineering conference without leaving the city.
And what a conference it was!
Why PostgreSQL Matters for Automation Infrastructure?
For those wondering why a team focused on marketing automation and integration infrastructure cares about PostgreSQL: database engineering is the foundation that everything else sits on.
When you’re processing 47 million marketing events monthly, handling webhook queues, managing idempotency tracking, and storing event data for compliance audits, your database architecture isn’t just important—it’s the difference between a system that scales and one that collapses at the worst possible moment.
PostgreSQL is the backbone of our automation stacks. The 18th annual P2D2 conference brought together PostgreSQL users and developers to discuss exactly the kind of real-world problems we deal with daily.
The Two-Day Format That Actually Works
P2D2 structured the event across two days: January 27 featured workshops and training sessions for smaller groups, while January 28 delivered 45-minute technical talks across multiple tracks.
This format is brilliant. Too many conferences pack everything into keynotes and vendor pitches. P2D2 gave us:
Day 1 (Workshops): Deep, hands-on sessions with 20-person groups. We attended a workshop on scaling PostgreSQL for high-write workloads—exactly what we need when our webhook ingestion systems are handling 15,000+ events per minute during peak campaign launches.
Day 2 (Talks): Technical presentations from practitioners solving real problems. No marketing fluff. No surface-level overviews. Just engineers showing production architectures, sharing failure stories, and documenting what actually works at scale.
What We Learned (And What Surprised Us)
The talks and workshops covered territory we care deeply about:
- Advanced query optimization techniques for complex joins and aggregations—directly applicable when we’re building reporting dashboards that need to aggregate millions of marketing touch points without table scans that lock up production databases.
- Replication strategies for high-availability setups. We run multi-region deployments where webhook receivers need sub-100ms write latency. Understanding how logical replication slots behave under load and what happens when replica lag spikes above acceptable thresholds isn’t theoretical for us—it’s operational necessity.
- Partitioning strategies for time-series data. Marketing event data is inherently time-series: emails sent, pages visited, forms submitted. We’re storing billions of timestamped events. The sessions on range partitioning, partition pruning performance, and managing partition lifecycle (when to drop old partitions, how to archive efficiently) gave us specific optimization paths to implement.
- Extension ecosystem deep-dives. We use PostGIS for geolocation-based segmentation, pg_cron for scheduled job management, and several custom extensions for specific data processing tasks. Hearing from extension maintainers about upcoming changes and performance improvements helps us plan infrastructure upgrades intelligently.
What surprised us most: the number of companies running PostgreSQL at scales we assumed required specialized time-series databases or NoSQL solutions. Teams managing 100TB+ datasets, handling 500,000+ writes/second, maintaining sub-10ms read latencies—all on PostgreSQL with smart architectural choices.
This validated our own approach. We’ve resisted the urge to fragment our stack across six different database technologies. PostgreSQL, properly configured and scaled, handles everything from transactional workloads to analytical queries to time-series event storage.
The Prague Advantage
Being local meant we could actually focus on the conference instead of dealing with travel logistics. No jet lag. No hotel check-in delays. No trying to find food in an unfamiliar city.
The venue at ČVUT FIT (Czech Technical University) is a 15-minute tram ride from our office. We attended both full days, stayed for all the networking sessions, and had real conversations with speakers and attendees without rushing to airports.
The local PostgreSQL community here is strong. The Czech and Slovak PostgreSQL Users Group (CSPUG) has been organizing P2D2 for 18 years. That kind of consistency creates an event that knows its audience. No first-year conference stumbling. Just a well-run, technically focused gathering.
The Conversations That Matter
The best part of any conference isn’t the scheduled content—it’s the unscheduled conversations.
We talked with a team managing PostgreSQL infrastructure for a logistics company processing 2 million package tracking events daily. Their challenges with write amplification during peak hours matched problems we’d solved for a SaaS client. We swapped implementation notes on connection pooling configurations, shared our PgBouncer settings, and discussed when to use statement-level vs. transaction-level pooling.
We met database architects from companies dealing with GDPR compliance for customer data at scale. Their strategies for implementing row-level security policies and audit logging aligned with the compliance requirements we face. We discussed trade-offs between trigger-based audit logging vs. logical replication to separate audit databases.
We connected with PostgreSQL extension developers who are building tools we didn’t know existed. One engineer showed us a custom extension for probabilistic data structures (HyperLogLog for cardinality estimation) that could replace our current Redis-based approach to unique visitor counting. Performance characteristics looked promising. We’re testing it this week.
These conversations don’t happen over email or Slack. They require face-to-face interaction, whiteboards, and the kind of rapid back-and-forth that only happens when you’re both focused on the same problem.
What We’re Implementing?
Good conferences leave you with actionable improvements. Here’s what we’re taking back to production:
Partitioning redesign: We’re moving from monthly partitions to weekly partitions for our event storage tables. Several talks demonstrated how finer-grained partitioning improves query performance when most queries target recent data (which is 90% of our analytical workload). Implementation starts next sprint.
Connection pool tuning: We learned that our PgBouncer pool sizes were too conservative. Based on formulas shared in a scaling talk, we’re increasing pool sizes and switching specific workloads from transaction pooling to session pooling. Expected result: 40% reduction in connection overhead.
Monitoring improvements: Multiple presenters showed Prometheus + Grafana dashboards for PostgreSQL metrics we aren’t tracking yet. We’re adding instrumentation for replication lag, checkpoint behavior, and vacuum progress. Better observability means faster incident response.
Backup strategy evolution: We’re implementing continuous archiving with point-in-time recovery capabilities based on a disaster recovery talk. Current backup approach (daily pg_dump) works but doesn’t give us sub-24-hour recovery granularity. New approach: WAL archiving to S3, tested recovery procedures monthly.
None of these are revolutionary. All of them are incremental improvements that compound into significantly better infrastructure reliability.
Why Database Conferences Matter for Automation Teams
If you’re building integration infrastructure, marketing automation platforms, or any system that relies on reliable data storage and retrieval, database engineering isn’t someone else’s problem—it’s your problem.
You can abstract away databases with ORMs and hosted services, but eventually you hit limits. Query performance degrades. Write throughput plateaus. Replication lag breaks real-time features. Connection pools saturate.
At that point, you need to understand how PostgreSQL actually works. Not surface-level “it’s a relational database” understanding. Deep understanding: how the query planner chooses indexes, how MVCC affects concurrent transactions, how autovacuum impacts write performance, how replication slots can fill disks if not monitored.
Conferences like P2D2 give you direct access to people who’ve already solved the problems you’re about to encounter. Not through blog posts (which are often outdated) or documentation (which is comprehensive but hard to navigate). Through direct conversation with practitioners running production systems at scale.
Final Thoughts
We’re grateful that Prague hosts a conference of this caliber. P2D2 2026 marked the 18th year of this PostgreSQL-focused event organized by CSPUG, and the quality shows that experience.
For anyone building data-intensive systems—whether that’s automation infrastructure, SaaS platforms, fintech applications, or anything requiring reliable transactional guarantees—PostgreSQL conferences are worth attending. Not for certification. Not for swag. For the technical knowledge and professional connections that make you better at your job.
Next year’s P2D2 is already on our calendar.
Event Details:
📅 January 27-28, 2026
📍 ČVUT FIT, Thákurova 9, Prague
🔗 Event site: p2d2.cz
🗣️ Organized by: CSPUG (Czech and Slovak PostgreSQL Users Group)
The Triumphoid Team
