Could you briefly introduce yourself?

Hello, I’m Stéphane Schildknecht. I’m 30 year old, for a couple of years now... I’m living in France, and doing PostgreSQL consultancy all over France, and Europe since beginning of the century.

I was the first director of the board of PostgreSQLFr, which I help settle in 2004, and has been until 2010.

I am PostgreSQL regional contact for the french-speaking Europe, one of the moderator of pgsql-fr-generale and regularly help on french translations.

I am managing director of Loxodata, The french PostgreSQL consulting company.

How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?

I started with PostgreSQL in 2001, for an important project in french national health. I liked what I saw, and jumped into that project.

A few years later, with some other French people we decided to create PostgreSQLFr, a non-profit organization for French-speaking PostgreSQL users in 2004/2005.

I had my first PostgreSQL talk in 2004.

In 2005, we had our first booth in Paris during the major opensource event in France.

In 2008, I helped Jean-Christophe Arnu to organize the first PGDay.fr with PostgreSQLFr in Toulouse (France).

I'm also involved in translations or proofreading French translations for press releases, and regional contact for the french-speaking Europe.

Have you enjoyed previous pgconf.eu or FOSDEM conferences, either as attendee or as speaker?

I missed Prato, but since then, I was in every pgconf.eu conference. I think it’s one of the best place to meet people contributing to with PostgreSQL, and people working with PostgreSQL.

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

It's all about WAL files. What they are, what their purpose is, what sort of information they contain, and most important, how to deal with crashed clusters or corrupted WAL files. When Jean-Christophe Arnu told me about this specific topic, I thought it would be a good way to share what we know about it (and possibly to learn things I never thought about before).

We've built special virtual machine image in order to create specific use cases for that training, this is a hands-on training!

What is the audience for your training?

Any DBA or DevOps who already has a previous experience in Point In Time Recovery and PostgreSQL Administration.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

This tutorial only requires the attendee to have a few knowledge about:

• the Debian PostgreSQL wrappers for cluster management
• psql (who does not?)
• a first experience with PITR
• be curious

What is the one feature in PostgreSQL 11 which you like most?

I should talk about ‘quit’ and ‘exit’ commands, but I still miss ‘:q’ as a way to quit ‘psql’ :-D

There are many features I’m glad to see. Improvements in partitioning are among them.

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

I’d like I could see all of them, but if I had to focus on some, I’d say:

• Advanced Logical Replication, by Petr Jelinek
• High Performance pgBackRest, by David Steele
• Cleaning out crocodiles teeth with PostgreSQL indexes - a story on all the index types in PG, by Louise Grandjonc
• Constraints: a Developer's Secret Weapon, by Will Leinweber
• Bloat in PostgreSQL: A taxonomy, by Peter Geoghegan