Courses / Developer track
PostgreSQL developer track

Understand what PostgreSQL does with your SQL

Seven live sessions, from reading an execution plan to migrating schema without locking the table. Book them individually, or take the whole track as an intensive at a lower total price.

7live sessions
16 h 10 minof instruction in total
Oct – Dec13 October to 17 December 2026
Liveonline, with Q&A in every session

Two ways to take it

Every session stands on its own, so a developer can take only what they need. Teams covering the whole subject pay less by taking the track together.

Session by session

Pick the sessions you need

Each session runs once, live, between October and December 2026, and covers one specific aspect of working with PostgreSQL — reading execution plans, indexing, planner statistics, query optimisation, SQL anti-patterns, schema migration, or EXPLAIN in depth.

Taken together they give a developer the full set of tools and techniques for working with PostgreSQL. Taken singly, each one answers the question you actually have.

Sessions up to 1h 40min are €150; longer ones are €200.
€150 or €200
per session, per person — by length
Choose your sessions→
The full track — best value

High Performance SQL with Postgres

A deep-dive course by the recognised PostgreSQL contributing sponsor, Data Egret, designed to help developers build fast and reliable applications with PostgreSQL at scale — advanced indexing, query optimisation, SQL best practices and interpreting EXPLAIN plans.

Seven 2½-hour live sessions over five days, in English on Zoom, with live demos and Q&A throughout. Attend all seven and the certificate covers the whole track.

17½ hours in total · sessions are not recorded · full schedule and programme
€850
per person before taxes — saves €400 against the €1,250 of booking separately
See dates and book→

Choose your sessions

Listed in the order they run. There are no prerequisites: each session is self-contained, so you can take the fifth without having taken the first. Together they cover the subject; separately, each one stands on its own.

DEV 1
Introduction to Execution Plans

How PostgreSQL decides to execute a query. The planner compares candidate plans and picks the one it estimates to be cheapest — this session explains what it is comparing and why.

Query life cycle · plan trees · cost estimation from statistics · EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE · reading large plans with explain.depesz.com and explain.dalibo.com
Tuesday
13 October 2026
1h 30min
Registration opens soon
€150
DEV 2
Indexing Techniques

How indexes actually work, when they help, and what they cost. Choosing the right index type for a query shape, and recognising the ones that will never be used.

Sequential, index, index-only and bitmap scans · B-tree, Hash, BRIN, GIN, GiST, SP-GiST and pgvector · multicolumn, partial, functional and covering indexes · write cost, concurrent creation, bloat and monitoring
Tuesday
27 October 2026
2h 30min
Registration opens soon
€200
DEV 3
Statistics for the Planner

Where the planner's estimates come from, and why a wrong estimate produces a wrong plan. How to spot inaccurate statistics and correct them.

Cost-based planning and the role of statistics · ANALYZE and autoanalyze · pg_stats and extended statistics · common causes of bad estimates · planner configuration and PostgreSQL 18 upgrade considerations
Wednesday
4 November 2026
2h 30min
Registration opens soon
€200
DEV 4
Introduction to SQL Optimisations

A systematic approach to tuning: find the queries that are worth the effort, diagnose what is wrong, then change the query, index or schema — in that order.

Performance triage from workload statistics, slow-query logs and application metrics · set-based SQL with joins, RETURNING, ON CONFLICT and MERGE · reducing data read and round-trips · connection pooling · transaction scope, locking, deadlocks and timeouts · when volume rather than query design is the limit
Friday
13 November 2026
1h 30min
Registration opens soon
€150
DEV 5

The SQL, schema and PostgreSQL anti-patterns that look reasonable in application code: why each one causes correctness, maintainability or performance problems, and what to do instead.

EAV schemas, multi-value columns and over-wide tables · transactions, locking and constraints for integrity · misuse of NULL, implicit column order, unnecessary subqueries · choosing boolean, jsonb, timestamptz, arrays and range types · index, pagination and VACUUM FULL pitfalls
Wednesday
25 November 2026
3h
Registration opens soon
€200
DEV 6

Changing schema and data on a live system without holding a lock that stops the application. Understanding what blocks, choosing the pattern that doesn't, and watching the migration while it runs.

Assessing workload, replication and rollback beforehand · lock modes, lock queues and timeouts · NOT VALID, VALIDATE CONSTRAINT and CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY · batched updates and deletes instead of long transactions · monitoring and verifying afterwards
Monday
7 December 2026
1h 40min
Registration opens soon
€150
DEV 7
Understanding EXPLAIN

The longest session, and the one that ties the track together. Reading a plan in depth — the planner's estimates against the executor's measurements — and a working method for diagnosing a slow query.

EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE with BUFFERS, WAL, SETTINGS, MEMORY, SERIALIZE and FORMAT · execution trees, node types, cost and row estimates · scans, join algorithms, aggregation, sorting and parallel execution · estimated against actual rows, hotspots and wasted work · plan caching and influencing plan selection
Thursday
17 December 2026
3h 30min
Registration opens soon
€200

Who it's for

Take this track if

  • You write SQL that runs against PostgreSQL in production, and someone else usually tells you it's slow.
  • You have read an execution plan before but couldn't say which part mattered.
  • You add indexes by intuition and are not certain they are being used.
  • Your team ships schema migrations and has been bitten by a lock at least once.

Assumed knowledge

Working SQL: joins, aggregates, subqueries. No DBA experience and no PostgreSQL internals assumed.

Managing the servers rather than querying them? The DBA track covers operations, backup, replication and tuning.

Why train with Data Egret

Every session earns a certificate

Attend a single session and you receive a certificate of attendance naming that session. Attend all seven — booked separately or as the intensive — and the certificate reads Working with High Performance PostgreSQL, covering the whole track.

Evidence for your team, your manager and your CV, either way.

1session — a certificate for that session
7sessions — the full-track certificate
Taught by practising consultants

Every trainer is a working Data Egret consultant and DBA — the same engineers who run our audits, performance tuning and 24/7 support. Answers come from production experience.

Theory against a real database

Each session pairs the material with live demonstrations run against a real PostgreSQL instance, in a small group, with questions taken throughout.

Founding member of OAPE

Data Egret helped found the Open Alliance for PostgreSQL Education — the first independent, community-driven certification programme, building a vendor-neutral industry standard.

A recognised PostgreSQL Contributing Sponsor

We fund and staff work on PostgreSQL itself — listed among the project's contributing sponsors — so we know how the project and its ecosystem function: which release to trust, which extension is genuinely maintained, and where a problem goes upstream.

Teams we have trained

We have taught teams at every stage of their PostgreSQL journey — those arriving from a commercial database and learning it from the beginning, and those who have run PostgreSQL for years and need to go deeper than the documentation takes them.

Private, tailored training for teams in banking, software and logistics, and public courses since the company began — delivered online or onsite, whichever suits the team.

“The small-group format made it feel very personal, and I always felt supported by the instructors. The skills I gained are already helping me better administer our Postgres environment — and the certificate is a big plus.”
Siyabonga Cindi, SQL Developer, 3Dtracking · PostgreSQL Essentials (DBA 1)

Instructors

Three instructors teach the track, and all three spend the rest of their week running PostgreSQL in production — audits, performance tuning, 24/7 support. The examples come from systems they operate, and the questions you ask are ones they have already had to answer under pressure.

Ilya Kosmodemiansky
Ilya Kosmodemiansky
CEO, Founder and PostgreSQL Consultant

Over 15 years of experience across Oracle, DB2, MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL. A recognised PostgreSQL contributor, active in the community through committees, user groups and international conferences.

Daria Nikolaenko
Daria Nikolaenko
PostgreSQL Database Administrator

A specialist in monitoring, high availability, performance tuning and scalable system architecture, with a background in banking, finance and telecommunications.

Thom Brown
Thom Brown
PostgreSQL Consultant

Over 20 years of industry experience, with extensive expertise in supporting clients on their PostgreSQL journey and achieving high availability for business-critical projects.

Practical detail

Format
Live on Zoom, in English, taught by a Data Egret engineer. Theory and live demos, with Q&A in every session; single sessions include two 10-minute breaks. Start times are shown with each session's date. Sessions are not recorded, whether you take one or the whole track.

Private team bookings
Any session, or the whole track, can be delivered privately for a single team — online or onsite — on dates that suit you. Pricing is quoted per team: write to contact@dataegret.com.

Invoicing
Prices are per person before taxes. You will receive payment instructions by email; pay by card or bank transfer. Your place is confirmed once payment is received. Terms and conditions.

Book a session, or the whole track

Two routes through the same material. Tell us which you want and how many people are coming.

One subject, one afternoon

If there is a specific thing you need — indexes, statistics, a query nobody can account for — take that session on its own. Every session stands alone, needs a single afternoon, and still earns a certificate for the subject it covers.

Or the whole subject in five days

Seven sessions taught in sequence, from a first execution plan to reading a production one in depth. It is the fastest route to becoming the person your team brings its PostgreSQL questions to.

Postgres, PostgreSQL and the Slonik Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada, and used with their permission. © 2026 Data Egret