Melanie Plageman

The PostgreSQL community is maintaining a list of recognized Major and Significant Contributors, curated by the Contributors Committee. Getting onto this list requires a lot of dedication; the people on this list have worked on PostgreSQL for years.

Writing a PostgreSQL performance patch requires more than identifying an optimization and implementing it. To propose the change effectively, you need a clear performance reproducer, meaningful measurements, and an understanding of the conditions where the patch helps, has little effect, or introduces tradeoffs.

This talk uses the recently committed eager scanning feature as a case study to walk through the Postgres feature development process. It’s meant to give prospective contributors a realistic look at what it takes to get a feature committed and to help users better understand how Postgres evolves and how they can benefit from these changes.

This talk will cover the process of debugging a bad plan starting from the explain output through hacking in a fix and recompiling the database. Topics covered will include: characteristics of a plan and how these map to components in Postgres code, strategies for producing a minimal repro, simple heuristics for developing a reference plan, using the debugger along with several GUCs to examine…