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Speaker Interview: Will Leinweber

Constraints: a Developer's Secret Weapon   Thursday 15:40   New York

Twitter: @leinweber Blog: bitfission.com GitHub: will Company website: www.citusdata.com

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

Hi, I’m Will. I’m coming from San Francisco, and I’ve been working on hosted postgres services for a while now, currently at Citus Data.

How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?

I mostly attend and speak at conferences, not so much on the mailing lists.

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

This will be my seventh pgconf.eu conference. I did fosdem once but it was too crowded for me, so I’m not sure about that one. I really appreciate how the .eu conference moves around each year as a visitor.

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

It’s about all the good things that come from adding restrictions and constraints to your database, and treating it as the last line of defense for bugs and bad data. I think it’s important because a lot of application developers tend to treat the database as just a place to store and retrieve information, and even just a few constraints can go a long long way to a healthier and more resilient application.

What is the audience for your talk?

Application developers.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

Nothing too much, anyone using postgres for their application should be good.

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

Channel binding for scram, which really makes it a good feature. Though I need to add scram support for my crystal language driver.

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

I saw "Cleaning out crocodiles teeth with PostgreSQL indexes - a story on all the index types in PG" at the recent conference in San Francisco, and it was very good. I’d like to check out Heikki’s server side C talk also.