PostgreSQL has risen to be the dominant choice for new projects and cost-saving migrations in an increasingly cloud-first, price-conscious world. Additionally, all three major cloud providers have invested heavily in PostgreSQL and their own forks, signaling a continued shift in the DBMS market. This increases the likelihood that you will be asked to manage an alternative RDBMS like PostgreSQL in the next 3-5 years.

In this session, I'll briefly introduce the history of PostgreSQL and what has allowed it to shine in this modern age. Next, we'll look at 10 areas of PostgreSQL including community, tooling, configuration, data types, and SQL differences. As a former SQL Server developer, I'll demonstrate how to transfer the knowledge you already have to how PostgreSQL works so that you can succeed faster on your next project.

By the end of the session, you will have enough information to connect to PostgreSQL with free tooling, modify common SQL to run correctly, get information about the state of the database, and help with basic query tuning.