Plovdiv was a very pleasant visit. Living in Cologne, I'm fairly used to having a lot of history around - a bit over 2,000 years of it. Plovdiv is a whole level more extreme: 8,000 years of continuous settlement, and with a location like that, centuries of shifting rule and changing hands to match. A guided city tour walked us through a good chunk of that: Thracian remains, a Roman theater still in daily use, layers of later history built right on top. On the conference days it turned genuinely hot outside, so having air conditioning in the lecture rooms mattered more than usual.
ESUG 2026, the 31st edition, was held at Plovdiv's Faculty of Informatics from July 7th to 10th, and recordings are already showing up on the esugboard Youtube channel.
I only gave one talk this year, "Soil - architecture", with Marcus Denker. It's a from-the-ground-up architectural walkthrough of Soil, and most of what's in it will look familiar to anyone following this blog's own Soil series - the same partial-graph idea, the same cluster record shape, the same index/heap and transaction-log mechanics, just compressed into thirty minutes of slides instead of months of posts.
Full program of ESUG 2026 is here.