Malcolm McLean
Senior Software Engineer at Evermed
Malcolm is a Software Engineer, PostgreSQL DBA, Linux admin, tinkerer and a bit of a pedantic perfectionist, having over 19 years of experience with PostgreSQL and somewhat more than that with Linux and development.
Upcoming presentations
No upcoming presentations...
Past presentations
From smallint to bigint and char to varchar, it's time to demystify the data types
With so many data types, which do you use and which should you avoid?
PostgreSQL has dozens of different data types. Some work better than others if different stations, but which do you choose for each situation? varchar or text? int or bigint? Do you ever use money?
This talk will run through each of the main data types to help understand when you should be using each of them
Mar 20 2025
Performance tuning PostgreSQL
Tuning PostgreSQL isn't as hard as you think
Out of the box PostgreSQL comes with very conservative performance settings. In this workshop, we'll look at many of the options that relate to performance and how to set them for your environment, as well as query optimization, statistics, operating system parameters and server resources.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but through this workshop, you'll get the fundamentals of perfo...
Mar 18 2025
Effectively securing your PostgreSQL database
Are you doing enough to secure your database and access to your data?
Securing access to your database and data seems obvious, but are you doing enough? The default settings within PostgreSQL and even the default firewall configuration on stock Linux installs are a far cry from being secure.
Even if you're not handling or storing credit card information, PCI-DSS defines many things to do in order to secure access to a database and operating system, which can b...
Oct 8 2019
Postgresql performance tuning - a crash course
Tuning PostgreSQL isn't as hard as you think
Out of the box PostgreSQL comes with very conservative performance settings. In this 3-hour workshop, we'll look at more useful options that relate to performance and how to set them for your environment, as well as query optimization, statistics, operating system parameters and server resources.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but through this workshop, you'll get the fundamentals o...
Sep 18 2019
Effectively securing your PostgreSQL database
Are you doing enough to secure your database and access to your data?
Securing access to your database and data seems obvious, but are you doing enough? The default settings within PostgreSQL and even the default firewall configuration on stock Linux installs are a far cry from being secure.
Even if you're not handling or storing credit card information, PCI-DSS defines many things to do in order to secure access to a database and operating system, which can b...
Sep 20 2019
Performance tuning PostgreSQL
Tuning PostgreSQL isn't as hard as you think
Presented as full-day training
Out of the box PostgreSQL comes with very conservative performance settings. In this workshop, we'll look at many of the options that relate to performance and how to set them for your environment, as well as query optimization, statistics, operating system parameters and server resources.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but through this workshop, ...
Mar 18 2019
Oct 9 2018
Performance tuning PostgreSQL
Tuning PostgreSQL isn't hard
Out of the box PostgreSQL comes with very conservative performance settings. In this talk, we'll look at some of the options that relate to performance and how to set them for your environment.
Oct 10 2018
A talk about indexes
Creating and maintaning indexes in PostgreSQL
This will be an introductory talk about indexes within PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL in a geographically distributed realtime transactional system
Selectively replicating data across geographically distributed servers
How and why we utilise PostgreSQL, our specific requirements for replication, how we handle it, what alternatives we looked at and what we are investigating for the future.
Our system is a geographically distributed system across multiple countries where data needs to be selectively replicated between each set of servers based on that country's legislation and failover requirements. This pos...
Apr 19 2018
Discussion on Postgres usage by the participants as well as the South African postgres landscape.
Utilising PostgreSQL in a realtime transactional system
Replicating data to a geographically distributed system
How and why we utilise PostgreSQL, our specific requirements for replication, how we handle it, what alternatives we looked at and what we are investigating for the future.
We will also look at a few simple, yet interesting things we do within the database.
Securing your PostgreSQL database
Are you doing enough to secure your database and access to your data?
Securing access to your database and data seems obvious, but are you doing enough? The default settings within PostgreSQL and even the default firewall configuration on stock Linux installs are a far cry from being secure.
Even if you're not handling or storing credit card information, PCI-DSS defines many things to do in order to secure access to a database and operating system, which can...