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Get an inside look at Postgres 19 development from our Hackers Panel. Join Álvaro Herrera (EDB), Heikki Linnakangas (PostgreSQL hacker, Databricks), Melanie Plageman (Microsoft), and Thomas Munro (Microsoft) for their keynote talk “Postgres 19 Hackers Panel: What’s In, What’s Out, & What’s Next” at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026. Abstract: What happens in the lead-up to a Postgres feature freeze, and why do some patches make the cut while others stall? Join four of the project’s open source contributors—Álvaro Herrera, Heikki Linnakangas, Melanie Plageman, and Thomas Munro—for a conversation about Postgres 19. With a combined ~75 years of experience hacking on Postgres, this panel will talk about some of the successful collaborations that pushed key features into Postgres 19, as well as the “missed the boat” list: features they wished had made the PG19 freeze (but are still in the works for the future.)
You’ll also get an early look at big-ticket items being engineered for Postgres 20 and beyond (yes, including multithreading.) From the technical hurdles of working on Postgres to the personal reasons that keep these hackers coming back to this database, you’ll get a peek into what’s coming next with Postgres.
Note: At the time of the recording of this keynote panel in April 2026, Postgres 19 will have just reached feature freeze and is expected to reach GA in the Sep/Oct 2026 timeframe.
Álvaro Herrera is a Postgres major contributor and committer currently under the EDB banner, Álvaro has been working as part of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group since release 7.2; interesting contributions include features such as savepoints, the integrated autovacuum daemon, shared row locking, the introduction of background workers, BRIN indexes, some partitioning features, and others. He frequently collaborates to get other developers’ code into Postgres.
Heikki Linnakangas is a long-time PostgreSQL developer and committer who co-founded Neon, now part of Databricks. Since 2023, Heikki has also been contributing to pgvector.
Melanie Plageman is a Postgres committer and major contributor working at Microsoft as a principal engineer. In the last decade, Melanie has worked on asynchronous IO, statistics, & vacuum subsystems in Postgres—these days she is spending a lot of time on write combining. Melanie also serves as organizer (and on the program committee) for the annual PGConf.dev conference.
Thomas Munro is a PostgreSQL developer and committer based in New Zealand. He began working full time on PostgreSQL and related technologies about 9 years ago, first at EnterpriseDB and now Microsoft. Before that he worked with Unix and relational databases in the web, finance and software industries for a couple of decades. Some of his PostgreSQL interests include query parallelism, taming resource management, transaction machinery, portability, and modernizing database/operating system interfaces including disk I/O.
► Video chapters:
⏩ 00:00 – Music & introduction
⏩ 00:56 – Life of a committer during freeze
⏩ 02:17 – New Postgres 19 features and ideas
⏩ 02:39 – The challenge of tuning async I/O
⏩ 05:56 – Why Postgres improves every release
⏩ 07:13 – When promising features miss the cut
⏩ 10:22 – Late-cycle pressure and commit decisions
⏩ 11:41 – Bringing pg_repack into core Postgres
⏩ 16:10 – What’s next after Postgres 19
⏩ 17:25 – Multithreading roadmap and challenges
⏩ 23:02 – How collaboration really works in Postgres
⏩ 28:18 – Time zones, async work, and momentum
📕 Everything you need to know about POSETTE: An Event for Postgres can be found at: https://posetteconf.com
✅ Learn more: watch more POSETTE talks: https://aka.ms/posette-playlist
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