Coming back to PGConf Brasil after years felt like a homecoming. João Pessoa welcomed me with warm Brazilian hospitality, amazing PostgreSQL community, and the perfect stage to share one of my most exciting projects: the 500GB Challenge with Selective Analytics.
Demonstrating real-time analytics with PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB at PGConf Brasil 2025
The PostgreSQL Performance Workshop
Everytime I have the opportunity to travel far I try to get extra opportunities to engage with the audience and propose extra workshops or activities to worth my long trips.
I ran this workshop as Postgresql Performance for Rubyists and this time I thought why not offer it language agnostic? So, I did it and now I repurpose it as a pure SQL version too.
I’m so glad it worked. I prepared it for Ruby Community Conference in Krakow, later offered at Tropical On Rails in São Paulo, and this time in João Pessoa at PGConf Brazil.
Workshop group selfie during the PostgreSQL Performance Workshop
The PostgreSQL Performance Workshop for Developers is an intro to database internals. Understand storage and concepts that you generally don’t learn until you need to handle query optimization tasks, indexing strategies reviewing. This performance tuning techniques always make me happy because understanding database internals made me a better developer.
Teaching PostgreSQL performance optimization techniques
My Talk: The 500GB Challenge
The next day, I took the main stage to present the “500GB challenge with TimescaleDB” - a real-world problem that led to the development of what I now call Selective Analytics.
Engaging the audience with hands-on PostgreSQL examples
I was quite happy that I presented the same talk on the previous saturday on PGDay Xap - in Chapecó, a city 2 hours from home.
The talk focused on a fascinating challenge: how do you handle 500GB of daily web traffic logs when you can only afford 20GB of storage? The solution I presented was Selective Analytics - a democratic approach to data management where information must “campaign” for permanent storage.
You can read the full technical details about Selective Analytics in my dedicated blog post, but the conference presentation focused on the real-world application and the impressive results:
- 99.6% storage reduction (500GB → 20GB)
- Real-time analytics with <5ms query latency
- Automatic identification of high-value data
- Cost-controlled storage that scales predictably
Great moments with Sebastian Webber at PGConf Brasil 2025
Why PGConf Brasil is Special
Being back at PGConf Brasil reminded me why this community is so special. The Brazilian PostgreSQL community is a diverse community, not only made of DBAs or SREs but a lot of developers, entrepreneurs and database enthusiasts too.
This year I had great time with folks from EDB like Bruce Monjian and Charly Baptista. They’re both Global Postgresql Community Leaders that truly bless the community.
In Brazil, PGConf is also an itinerant event which allow people to organize on a specific city.
The Talk Reception
The audience was incredibly engaged throughout the presentation. The concept of “democratic data management” really resonated with the PostgreSQL community - after all, PostgreSQL itself embodies democratic principles through its open-source development model.
During the Q&A session, we had fantastic discussions about:
- Real-world applications beyond web analytics
- How to adapt the concept to different data volumes
- Integration with existing PostgreSQL monitoring tools
- Performance considerations for various workloads
The presentation slides and complete technical implementation are available in the timescaledb-templates repository under the webtop folder, and you can read the detailed technical explanation in my Selective Analytics blog post.
Thank You, João Pessoa
As I flew back from João Pessoa, I carried with me not just the satisfaction of sharing useful technology, but the warmth of the PostgreSQL community. The conversations, the questions, the shared meals, and the genuine excitement about building better systems together.
PGConf Brasil proves year after year that it’s not just one of the best PostgreSQL conferences in the world - it’s one of the most welcoming and inspiring tech communities anywhere.
Want to dive deeper into the technical implementation? Check out my Selective Analytics blog post for the complete technical details, or explore the full presentation materials.
PGConf Brasil continues to be one of the most welcoming and inspiring PostgreSQL conferences in the world - I’m already looking forward to the next one!
Thank You, Tiger Data
I left Timescale, now the company is named Tiger Data. I still had these talks submitted when I left, but I love the topic, so I just decided to go by my own.
I reached out Isabel sharing the costs and they kindly said yes to support my trip.
Thanks for the support, Tiger Data! It was very welcome and appreciated 🐯🫶🏼
Have your own 500GB challenge? Want to implement selective analytics in your system? I’d love to hear about it! Connect with me on LinkedIn or check out my other talks and workshops on the talks page.
