Postgres Booth at PASS Data Community Summit

PASS Data Community Summit 2025 wrapped up last week. This conference originated 25 years ago with the independent, user-led, not-for-profit “Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS)” and the annual summit in Seattle continues to attract thousands of database professionals each year. After the pandemic it was reorganized and broadened as a “Data Community” event, including a Postgres track.

Starting in 2023, volunteers from the Seattle Postgres User Group have staffed a postgres community booth on the exhibition floor. We provide information about Postgres User Groups around the world and do our best to answer all kinds of questions people have about Postgres. The booth consistently gets lots of traffic and questions.

The United States PostgreSQL Association has generously supplied one of their booth kits each year, which has a banner/background and some booth materials like stickers and a map with many user groups and a “welcome to postgres” handout and postgres major version handouts. We supplement with extra pins and stickers and printouts like the happiness hints I’ve put together, a list of common extensions that Rox made, and a list of Postgres events that Lloyd made. Every year, we also bring leftover Halloween candy that we want to get rid of and we put it in a big bowl on the table.

One of the top questions people ask is how and where they can learn more about Postgres. Next year I might just print out the Links section from my blog, which has a bunch of useful free resources. Another idea I have is for Redgate and EnterpriseDB – I think both of these companies have paid training but also give free access to a few introductory classes – it would be nice if they made a small card with a link to their free training. I think we could have a stack of these cards at our user groups and at the PASS booth. The company can promote paid training, but the free content can benefit anyone even if they aren’t interested in the paid training. I might also reach out to other companies who have paid training and see if they’d be willing to open up a bit of pre-recorded introductory content for free. (Data Egret? Creston Jamison?) Come to think of it, a list of weekly newsletters and podcasts might also be a great thing to print on a handout or a card – Postgres Weekly, postgres.fm, Talking Postgres, Scaling Postgres, etc.

The disk in the picture below is not from our booth; it’s an original SQL server installation disk and the crew over at Fortified apparently found a whole box of them on eBay and were handing them out over at their booth. As a result, I overheard someone explaining to another conference attendee what is a “floppy disk” and why does the bottom open. (In the background, on our booth table, you can see that I “fixed” the DocumentDB sticker…)

This year, I took my home office white board and drove it down to the convention center along with a bunch of magnets. Rick Lowe’s wife Becka picked up two wall-mount metal mesh file organizers and four S-hooks, which we hung on the white board and filled with handouts that Ben Chobot printed on his home printer. Thank you! This worked really well and you can see it in the picture below. It freed up space on the table for other things like pins and stickers, the raffle, and a very cool elephant that Lloyd brought.

As always: a huge shout-out to our local volunteers! From the left in the picture below: Lloyd Albin, me, Ben Chobot, Deon Gill, Rick Lowe, and… Pavlo Golub who is not technically local but joined us for our volunteer dinner/hangout! Harry Pierson missed our volunteer dinner but he’s on the right side in the booth picture above.

We raffled off a signed copy of Ryan Booz and Grant Fritchey’s new book: Introduction to PostgreSQL for the data professional. Congratulations to our winner – Tomi from Croatia!

Most of my time was at the booth. I had one speaking session on Friday, and spoke about CloudNativePG Quorum Failover. I originally intended to just expand the talk from KubeCon the week before. But I ended up heavily re-writing after realizing that out of 242 sessions at PASS there were only 6 that even mentioned Kubernetes. I ended up spending the first half of the talk with a simple introduction to containers and Kubernetes – a couple slides and then a terminal window with docker and kind to demonstrate the basics.

Finally, it was great fun to catch up with some old Oracle friends like Kellyn Gorman, Gustavo René Antúnez, Shane Borden and Gleb Otochkin. And of course it was great to see Lukas Fitl and Ryan Booz and Grant Fritchey. These are all solid, amazing people and if you ever see them at a conference then don’t hesitate to introduce yourself and strike up a conversation!

I enjoy traveling for conferences but I’m still in a season of limited travel for family reasons (and probably will be for awhile) – so I look forward to any time Postgres people visit Seattle. Helping organize the Postgres booth for PASS is a bit of work, but it’s worthwhile for the chance to connect. I look forward to seeing the Postgres track grow at PASS Data Community Summit!