If you’ve spent years on SQL Server and you’re now looking at PostgreSQL, you’re not alone. And you’re not starting from zero. PASS Summit West 2026 has a track built for exactly this move, from a SQL Server team evaluating an open-source platform, to a SQL Server team running one in production.
PASS Summit West takes place November 9–11 in Seattle. Here’s the path we’d walk.
Start With the Pre-Con
Optional Pre-Conference Session: Monday, November 9
- Grant Fritchey & Pat Wright, Adding PostgreSQL to Your SQL Server Skill Set. This full-day session is built for people who already know SQL Server and need to add PostgreSQL alongside it. It covers where the two platforms overlap, where they don’t, and the tooling, documentation, and cloud resources that make the move easier.
Tuesday: A Look Ahead
- David Wagoner, Architecting Sovereign Hybrid Postgres via Kubernetes-Native Design. This one’s for teams thinking further ahead: production architecture covering high availability and portability across on-premises, private, and public clouds. More advanced than a first migration, but worth having on your radar early.
Then Build Through Wednesday
Wednesday builds through the day: start with the fundamentals, move into how the engine actually works under the hood, hit the spots where SQL Server habits trip people up, then close the loop on validating a real migration.
- Dave Bland, Migrating Your SQL Server DBA Skills to PostgreSQL. The common DBA tasks you already handle in SQL Server, mapped to how they work in PostgreSQL, terminology included. Also covers vacuuming, a concept SQL Server DBAs have never had to manage, and how permissions and security differ.
- Adam Machanic, PostgreSQL Storage Internals: From MVCC to TOAST and Beyond. Once the basics click, this is where you learn what’s actually happening under the hood: Multi-Version Concurrency Control, tuple versioning, write amplification, and TOAST for oversized values.
- Rick Lowe, PostgreSQL Indexes for the SQL Server DBA. Indexing works differently enough between the two platforms to catch experienced SQL Server DBAs off guard. This session walks through the index types available in PostgreSQL and where people typically stumble first.
- Vanshika Nigam & Amit Arora, Ensuring Data Integrity: Validation Strategies for PostgreSQL Migrations. The part of a migration that’s easiest to skip and most costly when you do: validating that what landed in PostgreSQL actually matches what you started with, including tools, sampling techniques, and how to validate stored procedures and triggers.
Also worth knowing: Denny Cherry’s Choosing the Right Data Store puts PostgreSQL in context against other Azure data platform options, useful if you’re still deciding where PostgreSQL fits versus other services. It runs opposite Rick Lowe’s indexing session, so you’ll need to pick one.
Why This Lineup
Everything here starts from the same assumption: you already know SQL Server, and that knowledge is an asset, not something to set aside. This track is built to carry it forward.