Interview with Francesco Tisiot
Talks
- Fix Your Strings!
- Thursday, 10:20
- Karnak
Social Media
- Could you briefly introduce yourself?
I’m Francesco Tisiot, Senior Developer Advocate at Aiven and Data aficionado! I’ve been in the data industry for ~15 years, helping people storing, organizing, transforming and making sense of data.
- How do you engage with the PostgreSQL Community?
I love engaging with the PostgreSQL community in several ways:
- Answering questions on public forums like StackOverflow
- Writing blog posts
- Talking at conferences
- Interacting at conferences
- Helping people that want to start in public speaking with abstract, talk feedback
- Have you enjoyed previous PostgreSQL Europe conferences, either as an attendee or as a speaker?
Yes, I’ve been lucky enough to participate in PGConf.EU, Nordic PGDay and the 2021 online version of the FOSDEM PGDay. Amazing experiences and excellent community.
- What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?
I have been in the data industry long enough to see a huge list of horror stories: dates, numbers, arrays stored as pure strings. One one side, storing all kind of data as string makes it EXTREMELY easy to avoid input errors since there’s no validation happening, on the other it generates unusable datasets.
The talk is about showcasing a real example of a restaurant booking system, and how we can take a “tragic” situation and, using proper data types, functions and inner beauties of PostgreSQL, create a proper set of tables that would host the data correctly.
- What is the audience for your talk?
The audience is anyone who needs to properly store data in PostgreSQL. I will showcase the usage of arrays, domains, proper data types, and the FuzzyStrMatch extension allowing us to check string similarity.
- What existing knowledge should the attendee have?
No previous knowledge is required, we’ll cover a lot of the basics needed to understand the PostgreSQL side of the problem. The only knowledge required is an idea on how you actually can manage an inventory of clients and restaurant bookings.
- What is the one feature in PostgreSQL 15 which you like most?
I love the new row filters and column lists options for logical replication. Allows a more strategic and tailored integration of PostgreSQL with other tools like Apache Kafka.
- Which other talk at this year’s conference would you like to see?
I’m very interested in the talk about PostgreSQL at scale with Mastodon by David Christensen. Mastodon is gaining popularity, and checking our PostgreSQL can serve its needs at scale is very interesting. Also, on a completely different topic, I’m curious about Magali’s talk on “why non-technical talks in tech events are so important”, since I strongly support the message “Our jobs are to build tech but we are humans. Humans interacting with other humans.”
- Which measure, action, feature or activity would - in your eyes - help to accelerate the adoption of PostgreSQL?
More content, examples, howtos, guides about the less known features that people might be interested in. JSON is a good example, there’s a ton of existing content, but still, related questions are always popping up in social forums like StackOverflow. Maybe we need content in different shapes?
