The Schedule for Postgres Extensions Day Montréal 2025 Has Been Announced!

The schedule is up, and it’s packed with interesting talks from across the PostgreSQL community. I’m excited to share that I’ll be presenting a recent extension of mine — one that’s been a bit of a monstrosity I’ve been hacking away at for a few months now. I’m thrilled to finally present it to the world:

Spat: Hijacking Shared Memory for a Redis-Like Experience in PostgreSQL

Abstract

Databases traditionally use shared memory as a transient workspace for query execution, caching, and transaction management, hidden from direct user control. But what if we could repurpose it for user-facing, high-performance data structures and general caching?

In this session, I’ll explore PostgreSQL’s shared memory APIs available to extension developers, including recent features like the DSM Registry. I’ll introduce Spat, a Redis-like in-memory data structure server embedded within PostgreSQL, where data is stored entirely in shared memory.

Spat provides an extended key-value model in which keys are strings, and values can be strings, lists, sets, or hashes. This offers a fast, lightweight alternative for ephemeral storage inside PostgreSQL.

This talk will cover the technical challenges and opportunities of using shared memory beyond its traditional scope, with insights for anyone interested in extending PostgreSQL.

spat is a PostgreSQL extension that builds a Redis-style in-memory data store directly on top of PostgreSQL’s shared memory infrastructure. We’re talking key-value storage, sets, lists, and hashes — all shoehorned into a place they were never meant to live.