About Us
Domain
A focused PostgreSQL learning platform built for practitioners who need to go beyond surface-level documentation.
One subject. Studied carefully.
Started in 2014 from St. John's, Newfoundland, Domain was built around a single observation: most PostgreSQL courses treat the database as a tool to configure rather than a system to understand. Seminars here are structured around the mechanics — query planning, concurrency, index internals, partitioning — not around feature checklists.
Participants come from twelve countries and work across industries where database behaviour directly affects business outcomes.
Sessions run remotely and are structured to allow real discussion. Questions get time. Edge cases get addressed. The goal is understanding that holds up when something unexpected happens in production.
The people who run the sessions
Two instructors with backgrounds in production database work, not just teaching.
Tobias Wren
Lead Instructor
Spent eight years working with high-volume PostgreSQL deployments before moving into instruction. Focuses on query optimisation and the internals of the planner. Runs the live seminar sessions and writes the technical reference materials.
Arlette Fouché
Curriculum Architect
Designed the session structure and exercises used across all seminar tracks. Her background is in data engineering, with particular experience in schema design for systems that evolve under load. Handles participant feedback and programme revisions.
How the sessions are structured
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1
Concept before syntax
Each topic opens with what PostgreSQL is actually doing — in the storage layer, in the planner, in the lock manager — before any SQL is shown. Syntax follows understanding, not the other way around.
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2
Live database work
Participants run queries against a shared instance during sessions. Execution plans get read together. Unexpected results get investigated rather than skipped.
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3
Discussion as a default
Sessions are capped at small groups. Participants from different industries often surface different problems with the same feature — that cross-context exposure is part of what makes the format useful.