Schedule - Nordic PGDay 2026

A PostgreSQL journey - what we learned migrating between 3 platforms

Date: 2026-03-24
Time: 15:10–16:00
Room: Vision 2+3
Level: Intermediate

Database migrations are rarely just about moving data. When your systems have been running for decades, you are also migrating years of history — tech debt, hard-won reliability, good decisions, bad decisions, and everything in between.

We share lessons from two major PostgreSQL migrations in the same organisation. Each migration solved real problems, but also exposed new ones: in performance, operational practices, developer behaviour, and organisational processes.

We'll focus on what we learned at each stage — from running PostgreSQL on VMs, to operating it in Kubernetes, to moving to a managed service. Along the way, migrations forced us to rethink alerting, maintenance routines, scaling models, client configurations, and even how teams relate to their databases.

This is a story about trade-offs, surprises, and rediscovering your systems under new constraints. Migrations are a rollercoaster — challenging, revealing, and, if you're lucky, a lot of fun.

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