Today we take a deep dive into the world of PostgreSQL extensions, featuring our conversation with Heikki Linnakangas, co-founder of Neon, an expert Postgres hacker, and contributor to pgvector. Heikki shares the fascinating story of how Neon was born in 2021, driven by the vision of creating an open-source platform akin to Aurora Serverless. He delves into the early challenges and triumphs of building a fully remote startup during pandemic times, including the excitement of growing from a handful of employees to a bustling company with 600,000 databases under management.

In this episode, we explore:

• From a startup idea to managing over 600K databases
• Building a remote-first culture and the power of annual off-site meetings
• Time travel… how Neon's unique storage system enables quick point-in-time recovery
• Upcoming Postgres features like asynchronous IO and multi-threading
• How understanding new algorithms can help database management

Links mentioned:

Neon

Heikki Linnakangas on GitHub

Heikki Linnakangas on LinkedIn

Joining Aiven in 2021, Francesco Tisiot works as a Field CTO and AI Lead. He serves as a technical advisor to clients and prospects, helping to meet their needs without the focus on sales, acting as a 'rented' CTO to provide expert guidance. Join us as we dive into Francesco's insightful perspectives on the Postgres community, where he challenges the notion of valuing years of experience over actual contributions and expertise.

In this episode, we explore:

• How Postgres is a core focus for Aiven
• Strategies for incorporating diverse viewpoints within the community
• The perception of Oracle within the Postgres community
• Benefits and challenges of using AI tools for database optimisation
• Acquisition of EverSQL by Aiven for integrating AI tools in SQL performance tuning

Links mentioned:

Aiven for AlloyDB Omni

Francesco Tisiot on X

Francesco Tisiot on LinkedIn

Today we’re joined by Ray Lane and DJ Patil from GreatPoint Ventures. Ray, known for his pivotal role at Oracle during its turnaround, shares his journey from the US Army to top tech positions and eventually co-founding GreatPoint Ventures, where he supports entrepreneurs. DJ Patil – investor, entrepreneur, and former U.S. Chief Data Scientist – joins to dive into the evolution of databases.

Tune in as they share their experiences with early databases such as Db2, the rise of Postgres, and current challenges in the tech landscape. With insights on leadership, community-driven development, and more, this episode is a must-listen for developers, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts.

In this episode, we explore:

• The critical need for evolving roles within a company to foster growth
• Challenges of data distribution vs. keeping data centralized and speedy
• “Siding with the community” and enhancing user capabilities
• The risks of rushing towards generative AI, and the importance data hygiene and data culture

Links mentioned:

GreatPoint Ventures

DJ Patil on LinkedIn

Ray Lane on LinkedIn

Sai Srirampur is the co-founder of PeerDB and a veteran Postgres Solutions Engineer with experience at Citus Data and Microsoft. He has been at the forefront of optimizing and scaling Postgres for large data workloads and is now spearheading innovation in data movement and replication with PeerDB. In this episode, we'll discuss the challenges of tuning massive Postgres systems, real-time data streaming solutions, and PeerDB’s vision for the future.

In this episode we explore:

• Leaving Microsoft and starting Sai’s own company, PeerDB
• Developing PeerDB's data movement and replication tool
• Why Postgres might not be suitable for everything at a large scale
• Having team members be database experts first before being software developers
• The growing customer demand for Clickhouse and Snowflake

Links mentioned:

PeerDB

Sai Srirampur on X (@saisrirampur)

Sai Srirampur on LinkedIn

In this episode, we talk Postgres committer Melanie Plagemean about her involvement with @PGConfdev, improvements to vacuum scheduling and auto vacuum configuration, the logical replication of DDL, and platforms such as CNCF and Kubernetes integrating with Postgres.

Links mentioned:

PGConf.dev

YouTube – CMU Database Group

Path To Citus Con Podcast

@melanieplageman@mastodon.social

Melanie on X (@melanieplageman)

Bharath Rupireddy has carved a niche for himself in the Postgres community since he began using the database system back in 2020. From his start at EnterpriseDB to making strides at Microsoft, and now contributing to the AWS open-source project, Bharath is entrenched in the inner workings of Postgres development. He has worked in many areas of Postgres such as WAL, Replication, pg_walinspect extension, bug fixes, performance improvements, new SQL functions etc.

In this episode we explore:

• Starting with Postgres in 2020 and learning the basics while contributing to Parallel COPY feature
• Postgres recent features such as pg_walinspect extension, WAL source switch from archive to streaming, WAL insertion lock improvements, WAL read from buffers, more replication slot invalidation mechanisms like XID age based and inactive_timeout based ones, new table access methods for multi inserts.
• The future of native active-active replication
• The complexities of conflict resolution
• Using PostgreSQL 16 in production scenarios for active-active replication
• The role of databases evolving within different industries

Links mentioned:

¡Databases! – A Database Seminar Series

Hacking Postgres, Ep. 9: Bertrand Drouvot

PGConf India

Hyderabad PostgreSQL User Group

PGConf.dev

Bharath on LinkedIn

Bharath on X (@BRupireddy)

Bharath on Github

As the podcast host of The Builders, member of Postgres Women, and Staff Engineer at EDB, Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek is passionate to see where this space will take us. We kick off Season 2 with Gülçin as she shares her journey in the tech industry, CloudNativePG, the impact of AI on Postgres, and the representation of women in the Postgres community.

In this episode we explore:

• CloudNativePG in Gülçin’s products and the new SPGVector release
• Welcoming new developers to the PostgreSQL community
• Tembo Cloud, PG vector, and the challenges and rewards of contributing to such innovative projects
• Improving inclusivity and support for women in the tech industry
• The use of Postgres in AI workloads

Links mentioned:

The Builders: A Postgres Podcast

Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek on X

EDB

Postgres Women on X

Alongside his peers studying Systems Network Engineering, Jelte Fennema-Nio unearthed a security vulnerability within the framework of Postgres. Since then, Jelte joined the world of cybersecurity and network engineering. He is currently Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Citus/ Postgres/ PgBouncer.

In this episode we explore:

• Forking and the impact of commercial entities on the core project
• The challenges of connection pooling
• The suitability of Citus for scalability
• The intricacies of configuring PgBouncer
• Paying attention to community needs and modernizing contribution methods

Links mentioned:

Jelte on X

Jelte on LinkedIn