Author: lahitha

On October 15, the Illinois Prairie PostgreSQL User Group will host a special meetup with Henrietta “Hettie” Dombrovskaya, Database Architect at DRW and longtime PostgreSQL community leader. This session is a sneak preview of her new talk that she will present later this month at PG Conf EU in Riga.

Hettie’s presentation, “Long Queries and the Art of Full Scan,” explores a common but often overlooked challenge: analytical queries that grow slower as data volumes increase. While it’s tempting to dismiss infrequently run reports as unimportant, ignoring performance can turn a query that once took minutes into one that drags on for hours or even days. In this talk, Hettie will share strategies for recognizing when full scans are unavoidable and for building reports that remain efficient and scalable over time.

With more than four decades of academic and industry experience, Hettie has contributed significantly to the PostgreSQL ecosystem, from co-authoring PostgreSQL Query Optimization (Apress, 2024) to creating training databases and performance tools used worldwide. This meetup offers a unique chance to learn from her expertise in an intimate, community-focused setting—before the talk debuts on an international stage.