Speaker Interview

Miroslav Šedivý

Hi! Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Miroslav Šedivý, shortly Miro. I was born in Czechoslovakia, studied in Lyon, and now I live near the easternmost point of France, just the other side of the Rhine river, two and half hours by train from Paris.

I switched to PostgreSQL from MySQL and Oracle more than ten years ago and never looked back. My main programming language is Python, but I prefer to speak other languages.

How do you engage with the PostgreSQL community?

I spoke at PostgreSQL conferences in Switzerland and in Russia and met plenty of PostgreSQL users at Python conferences around Europe. And I’m always happy to recommend PostgreSQL as a great open source database software with plenty of features covering most needs of those who ask for advice.

Have you enjoyed previous pgDay Paris or other PostgreSQL Europe conferences, either as attendee or as speaker?

This is my first pgDay Paris conference and I’ve never been to any other conference organized by PostgreSQL Europe. But would love to.

What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

Bitemporality means two dimensions of time. You not only track when some fact was valid in the real world, but also when its record was valid in your database. Practically this means you can do INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE on your database and always be able to SELECT records valid at any point of the history of your database. Something like a single Git branch with commits, a poor man’s time travel in PostgreSQL anyone can fully understand and adapt to their needs.

What is the audience for your talk?

Anyone who needs to add versioning to their data model and was afraid to build their own.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have in order to follow your talk?

Ability to project two dimensions of time in their head. Just joking. Bring your basic SQL.

Which missing feature would you most like to see in PostgreSQL?

A big pointer to some good documentation that would show me all the possibilities of PostgreSQL in a narrative form with good examples. I’m using the official documentation as a reference for the questions I already have, but don’t know where to find the questions I still didn’t ask. That’s why I’m still unable to tell whether any feature is really “missing”.

Thank you!