At the end of September 2025, PGConf New York City will take place at Convene facilities at 117 West 46th Street in New York City. Looking at the incredible companies who are sponsoring this conference, the fact that it is a full three days, and the incredible speaker line up, I am confident this will be a fantastic event. It is being run by the United States PostgreSQL Association (PgUS).
We have recently moved the Boston Postgres Users group under the PgUS umbrella. I really want to see the Postgres Community grow here in the US and I feel supporting PGUS in every way possible is extremely important. Therefore, I will be attending this conference. I was also extremely fortunate to have a talk I submitted accepted.
I will be speaking about Postgres Table Access Methods (TAMS).
What are Table Access Methods (TAMs) ?
Postgres Table Access methods were introduced in Postgres as 12 (six years ago now!). My impression was they were the first step part of a larger vision with a number of follow on features. I don’t think the larger vision has been realized yet. However, the Table Access Methods feature IMHO is under utilized and it opens up a whole new way for developers and DBAs to tune a database without changing the application.
The way this is accomplished is by understanding the database access patterns of the application and applying the appropriate Table Access Methods (assuming they exist) to a table.
In simple terms, TAMS enables a user to replace the storage format of a table in a database to a different storage format via a user supplied extension. The full documentation for Table Access Methods can be found here. My colleague Vibhor Kumar has written several nice blogs on the TAMS EDB provides. One of my favorite Vibhor blogs is located here.
For instance, if you know a table is insert-only, a Table Access Method could be developed that eliminates a lot of row header information. The result being you need far less storage for the table and far less memory. This combination often results in the application running significantly faster and being far less expensive to run as a result of the savings you get on storage (especially cloud storage).
What will I talk about?
In addition to providing an overview of what Table Access Methods are and how they are used here are something I will talk about:
At EDB we have taken some of our top talent to develop Table Access Methods for our customers. I will discuss a bit about what we have done and what several other companies have done to take advantage of the Table Access Method functionality in Postgres.
Other companies have also developed Table Access Methods. I will give a short description of some of the things they have accomplished.
I plan on demoing my Vibe Coded application to show how TAMs can be identified and applied. I hope you can attend my presentation!
Unfortunately, the schedule has me speaking at the same time as EDB super star speaker Boriss Mejias. So if you don’t get to attend my talk and are interested in the subject, please let me know. I would love to speak to you at the conference or in any other venue.