PostgreSQL Edinburgh Meetup August 2026

Be part of our Edinburgh PostgreSQL Meetup!

Join the PostgreSQL Edinburgh organisers and fellow PostgreSQL enthusiasts at Room LG45, Paterson's Land, University of Edinburgh! Connect with peers (all levels welcome!) for an evening of insightful discussions, networking, pizza, and refreshments.

Agenda

• 6:00 PM: Doors Open, Pizza & Networking
• 6:55 PM: Introductions & Community Announcements
• 7:00 PM: Torsten Förtsch – Logical Replication: Escape the Cloud, Own Your Data
  A seemingly simple problem: how do you own your data in a PG-as-a-service environment? In the worst case, the provider suddenly ceases to exist. This is the story of a project that started with a chance encounter with Euler Taveira, the author of wal2json, in Greece. I'll show a <100-line piece of code converting the JSON back to SQL using jq. I'll talk about early optimizations of that code. Next comes why I abandoned that code, the direction I am going now, and some ideas for the future. I will also show a very simple, get-it-done-and-forget (almost) solution.
• 7:45 PM: Paolo Guagliardo – Expressive Representations of Missing Values in Relational Database Systems
  Relational Database Systems are ill equipped to deal with missing values, mainly because the SQL standard provides no explicit support for them beyond the infamous NULL value, which suffers from several problems, including semantic ambiguity and limited expressiveness. On the other hand, there is a rich research literature on incomplete databases that relies on the theoretical notion of “marked nulls”, which are essentially nulls with an associated identifier. However, no concrete system supports them.
  In this talk, I will discuss possible options for implementing marked nulls in real RDBMSs and the challenges this presents, and I will show how the standard features provided by SQL fall short in accomplishing such a task, both in terms of performance and portability. I will then present an efficient implementation of marked nulls in PostgreSQL, along with some preliminary experiments on TPC benchmarks and the IDMB/JOB dataset.
• 8:40 PM: Wrap-up
• 8:45 PM: Event End & Post-Meetup Social – We will probably be heading over to The Tolbooth Tavern (just a short walk away) to continue the conversation. Whether you're joining for a pint, a soft drink, or just to hang out and chat, we'd love for you to drop by!

This meetup is bound by the PostgreSQL Code of Conduct.

If you'd like to speak at one of our meetups, please drop us an email at vyruss000 (at) gmail.com.

Event kindly sponsored by pgEdge.