Phil Vacca builds teams that scale. As Director of Datavail's Global Postgres Practice, he oversees distributed engineering teams that support mission-critical PostgreSQL deployments from AI-powered applications to high-speed analytics platforms spanning multiple continents.

With nearly two decades of experience wearing every hat from developer to production data engineer to engineering leader, Phil has navigated the evolution of data infrastructure firsthand. His leadership philosophy centers on transforming reactive teams into proactive platform services through visibility, accountability, and blameless collaboration.

An active voice in the PostgreSQL community, Phil is a member of pgMKE (Milwaukee Postgres User's Group) and has shared his expertise at conferences including Postgres Open, SCaLE, LinuxFest Ohio, and the Boston Data Summit. Whether he's architecting cloud-native solutions or mentoring the next generation of data engineers, Phil remains passionate about one thing: empowering teams to harness the power of the world's most advanced open source database.

Presentations

23x

Did VS Code Quietly Become a Go-To Postgres Tool?

It's no secret that VS Code from Microsoft is a popular code editor. It's free, it's loaded with shortcuts and themes, and you can extend it with the vast plugin network. Some of those extensions are written and maintained by Microsoft, and they've created a few that Postgres administrators will want to know about. With these extensions VS Code becomes more than a code editor, it's a comprehensive database management environment.

The PostgreSQL Extension

The official PostgreSQL extension allows you to connect to databases, manage objects, write queries, export data, and more! We'll explore how it brings database development directly into your editor:

- Connecting to instances and managing credentials
- Browsing schemas, objects, and functions (and getting Intellisense, too!)
- Writing and executing queries
- Exporting results

GitHub Copilot: AI-Enabled Chat Partner

GitHub Copilot brings AI into your workflow, with Postgres-specific suggestions and integrations. It connects to your database and enables an @pgsql chat partner to bounce ideas off of, and even issue database altering commands to if you're truly bold.  We'll learn:

- How Copilot learns your schema and suggests SQL
- Using the agent to help write queries, look for optimizations, and troubleshoot issues
- Security considerations and best practices for safe Production usage

Oracle to Azure Schema Conversion

Oracle to Azure Schema Conversion is an exciting new extension that will radically cut the time it takes to perform Oracle to Postgres migrations. It's powered by Azure OpenAI to provide intelligent transformation capabilities for complex schema operations. This segment covers:

- Analyzing an Oracle schema and suggesting Postgres equivalents
- AI-driven conversion of Oracle native PL/SQL, packages, sequences, etc.
- How the tool flags potential problem areas, and how to test your results

Lastly, we'll talk about why these tools matter, and how their introduction signals a broader shift in database tooling. This talk is ideal for PostgreSQL developers and DBAs who want to streamline their workflows, teams evaluating database tooling options, and anyone curious about how AI is transforming database development. Whether you're a VS Code veteran or have never considered it for database work, you'll leave with practical techniques you can apply immediately.

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16x

The Many Faces of PostgreSQL Replication

Whether running Postgres on premise or in the Cloud, on Docker, in Kubernetes pods, or anywhere else you can imagine, the principles of replication remain the same. Let's discuss PostgreSQL's streaming and logical replication methods - what options there are and what they mean, how to set them, and how to keep it all running. We'll discuss the term High Availability in the context of a database, and compare this with Recoverability. We'll discuss advantages and caveats of both replication methods, and we'll discuss in which situations they are each useful.

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