PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2026

Let’s be honest: nobody actually likes a midnight maintenance window. Taking an application offline to reclaim disk space, holding your breath during a sequence cutover on a logical migration, or dealing with flaky schema parsing scripts introduces massive operational stress.

For years, the community has relied on complex external workarounds or third-party extensions to bypass these core limitations. With PostgreSQL 19, the engine is growing up. It is absorbing these operational headaches and turning them into native, first-class, non-blocking primitives. This talk is a practical, battle-tested operational guide for DBAs, SREs, and engineering leads who need to maintain continuous database uptime.

Through quick, side-by-side structural demos, we will look at the painful "Before" vs. the native "After," diving straight into three core pillars of the Postgres 19 ecosystem:

1- Native, Non-Blocking Space Reclamation: We’ll contrast the old way of relying on external extensions like pg_repack against the new in-core REPACK CONCURRENTLY mechanism. You’ll see how the core engine natively handles logical decoding boundaries to clean up tables on high-traffic primaries without blowing out write latency or replication slot lag.

2- Flawless Logical Failovers: Sequence drift is a historic headache during logical migrations, usually requiring custom, error-prone sync scripts. We will look at how the new logical sequence synchronization workers (REFRESH SEQUENCES) handle this natively to guarantee a clean, conflict-free cutover before you promote a subscriber.

3- Decoupled Schema Automation: We’ll show how to replace the brittle text-parsing of old pg_dump outputs with stable, native DDL extraction catalog functions like pg_get_database_ddl to seamlessly automate schema verification pipelines inside your CI/CD engine.

Key Takeaways for Attendees:

• Master Live Table Rebuilds: Implement native REPACK CONCURRENTLY safely, understanding how to monitor WAL production and manage replication slots under heavy write workloads.

• Eliminate Sequence Drift: Step-by-step configuration of sequence synchronization workers to ensure flawless, zero-data-loss logical migration cutovers.

• Automate Schema Pipelines: Leverage new in-core catalog contracts to pull database, role, and tablespace DDL directly into automated infrastructure-as-code workflows.