I worked many years at 2ndQuadrant; in 2020 it was acquired by EDB, where I now work as the Vice President, Practice Lead High Availability, providing technical leadership internally and to customers. Before that, I worked at the University of Florence as a researcher in Mathematics, using Free Software since 1997. I have been a board member of the Italian PostgreSQL User Group (ITPUG); I helped organising the first European PGDay in Prato, Italy (2008) and many editions of the the Italian PGDay. I am an author of several editions of the PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook.
The Write-Ahead-Log (WAL) is central in many PostgreSQL processes and best practices. This talk will start with a brief history of its introduction, and then move on to some examples of the capabilities that WAL enables: faster crash safety, efficient and restartable hot backups, physical replication, and finally logical decoding.