David Rowley

About the Speaker

• Tell us about yourself: career, family, passions

  David is a principal software engineer working for Microsoft. He is a PostgreSQL user, contributor and committer who has been using PostgreSQL for 20 years and has been working full-time on the code for the past 10 years. David can mostly be found working on the query processing part of PostgreSQL and has worked extensively on making improvements to the query planner.

• What is your favorite hobby?

  In his spare time, David likes to explore New Zealand's South Island backcountry and commonly uses hiking and white-water rafting as a means to do that.

About the Talk

• Tell us about your talk. Why did you choose this topic?

  In each recent release of PostgreSQL there have been enhancements to the query planner. and this year with PostgreSQL 18, which will be released later in 2025, things are no different. In the talk, we'll go through what has changed for this version and we'll see examples of the new behavior of the planner vs how the planner behaved in PostgreSQL 17. It's often easier to understand these changes by seeing examples, as often these changes are more complex than what can be practically explained in the release notes.

• Who would benefit the most from your talk and why?

  This talk is best suited to existing users of PostgreSQL who are keen to discover which aspects of query planning will be improved in the next version to be released. It will also be useful for people who are considering migrating from another RDBMS to PostgreSQL.

• What existing knowledge should an attendee have?

  Attendees are best to be familiar with the EXPLAIN command and the output that it displays, or at least familiar with query processing and have some grasp of computer science concepts.

About PostgreSQL

• What inspired you to work with PostgreSQL?

  I was drawn to working on the PostgreSQL code base because of the desire to maintain the code base to a high standard. I'm also very interested in writing high-performance C code, and I believe relational databases are good places to apply those skills.

About POSETTE & Events

• What motivated you to speak at this year’s POSETTE: An Event for Postgres?

  Claire made me feel guilty for not doing it in previous years 😅

• What other PostgreSQL events in 2025 are you excited about and why?

  PGConf.dev. I'm excited about this as I'll get to meet and talk with many people who I interact with daily on the PostgreSQL community mailing lists. I'm also looking forward to a talk I'm giving there about modern CPUs and PostgreSQL.