Postgres Storytelling: Cunning Schema Design with Creative Data Modeling | POSETTE 2025

Video of a conference talk following Evelyn Kates, who is not sure how to get started designing the database schema for a complex application. She has been commissioned to track the results of a chess tournament. Evelyn’s colleagues advised her to meet the grumpy DBAs in the cellar of the building to get some help, but instead of a grumpy dude, she found Monica DeBea, the talented yet underrated support engineer, capable of taking up any challenge. Using her experience, Monica sat with Evelyn and a coffee - two coffees - and they set themselves to the creative and rewarding task of data modeling. In this talk, presented in the format of an illustrated storytelling, you will learn some principles of data modeling, letting PostgreSQL guarantee data integrity. This will help you build the business logic in the model itself, giving you extra powers as a software developer, while learning to collaborate with your DBA team. We believe that with this talk you will want to start applying these principles to your current and future projects. Boriss Mejías is a PostgreSQL Solutions Architect at EDB. He has more than a decade of experience in distributed self-managing systems as a software and systems engineer, and holds a PhD in Computer Science. In his free time, Boriss enjoys contributing his expertise to open source communities, being an organizer of PGDay Lowlands and an active member of the PostgreSQL User Group in Belgium. Boriss loves music, especially metal, folk and classical. He enjoys playing the air guitar, and gives his heart to playing in the band Trasandinos. Sarah Conway is a DevRel specialist and technology evangelist with over 12 years’ experience in the field, with a significant focus in the worlds of open source and PostgreSQL. An expert with many hats, she's taken on many roles over time including frontend developer, software engineer, developer advocate, cloud evangelist, product marketing manager, conference organizer, diversity & inclusion leader