Intensely local user groups have been part of Jeremy Schneider's story from the start—from Linux meetups at a Michigan coffee shop to a closet server running an Oracle database nobody knew anything about. In Episode 40 of Talking Postgres, Postgres engineer and Seattle Postgres User Group co-organizer Jeremy Schneider joins Claire to share how community led him to Postgres after 15 years with Oracle—and why "it's like I was born to be here." Plus: the newly-updated Postgres Happiness Hints poster, advice for starting your own user group, and his POSETTE 2026 talk on CloudNativePG.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep 38: How I went from Oracle to Postgres (with a big NoSQL detour) with Gwen Shapira

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Seattle Postgres User Group: Meetup page
• Seattle Postgres User Group: YouTube channel
• User Group Map from PGConfEU 2025 talk: 48 Postgres User Groups during PG18 timeframe
• PostgreSQL.org: Listing of local Postgres User Groups
• Postgres Meetup For All (a virtual meetup): Meetup page
• Jeremy Schneider’s Blog: Ardent Performance Computing
• Poster: Postgres Happiness Hints
• PGConf.dev 2026: Posters from Poster Session
• PGConf.dev 2026 Poster Session: Talking Postgres poster
• POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026: Jeremy’s POSETTE 2026 talk with Leonardo Cecchi
• POSETTE 2026: Livestream 3 schedule & talks
• Oracle docs: Oracle Database Concepts PDF
• Book: Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table

What does it take to make Postgres and Azure fit together cleanly, like puzzle pieces? In Episode 39 of Talking Postgres, Adam Prout—distinguished engineer at Microsoft and a founding architect of Azure HorizonDB—joins Claire to trace his engineering journey from MemSQL to Postgres. We dig into shared-storage architecture and how HorizonDB pushes more work into the storage layer; why the team chose Rust; and what “good systems programming” looks like when being paranoid is a feature, not a bug. Along the way: startup vs big company tradeoffs, and how working on databases exposes you to so many interesting parts of computer science.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep29: How I got started leading database teams with Shireesh Thota

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Blog post: Announcing Azure HorizonDB, by Charles Feddersen & Affan Dar
• CMUDB talk: HorizonDB: Co-Designing Postgres and Azure for Cloud-Native OLTP, by Adam Prout
• Research paper: Socrates: The New SQL Server in the Cloud
• Product page: Azure HorizonDB
• Video of POSETTE 2025 talk: Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI
• Blog post: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users, by Bohan Zhang
• Blog post: Supporting ChatGPT on PostgreSQL in Azure, by Affan Dar, Adam Prout, & Panagiotis Antonopoulos
• Docs: Azure Database for PostgreSQL
• GitHub repo: pgrx
• Discord: PostgreSQL Hacking server
• Conference: PGConf.dev 2026
• Conference Schedule: PGConf.dev 2026 Schedule

It’s rare for developers to genuinely love their database, so why does Postgres earn that kind of loyalty? In Episode 38 of Talking Postgres, Gwen Shapira, co‑founder of Nile, joins Claire to trace her path from operating Oracle at scale, through a long NoSQL chapter, to co‑founding a Postgres company that wasn’t originally meant to be one—after discovering how much Postgres quietly gets right. Gwen shares how she spun up on Postgres after years with other databases (shout-out to the Happiness Hints and a strong sense of curiosity), and why Postgres has made her appreciate Codd. We also touch on blogging as a career catalyst, the upcoming PGConf.dev conference (where a lot of PG20 work gets discussed, and where we’ll celebrate 30 years of Postgres)—and the #1 rule of consulting: it’s always the consultant’s fault.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep15: My Journey to Explaining Explain with Michael Christofides
• Talking Postgres Ep24: Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas
• Talking Postgres Ep30: AI for data engineers with Simon Willison

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Gwen’s company: Nile
• Ardent Performance Computing blog: PostgreSQL Happiness Hints
• Book: Just Use Postgres! by Denis Magda
• GitHub repo: HypoPG
• Wikipedia page: Codd’s 12 rules
• Blog post: Transaction Isolation in Postgres, by Gwen Shapira
• Podcast: Postgres.FM
• Discord server: PostgreSQL Hacking

Upcoming conferences & talks mentioned:

• Conference: PGConf.dev 2026 on May 19-22 in Vancouver Canada
• Conference Schedule: PGConf.dev 2026 schedule
• CFP deadline: PGConf.dev Community Discussion Sessions deadline on 14 Apr 2026
• Conference: PGConf EU 2026 in Valencia Spain
• LinkedIn post: PGConf.dev 2026 conference t-shirt, celebrating 30 years of Postgres
• POSETTE 2026 talk: The Rise of PostgreSQL as the Everything Database, by Varun Dhawan
• PGConf.dev 2026 Panel: Real-Time Patch Idea Evaluation
• PGConf.dev 2026 Roundtable: Unexpected Successes & Epic Failures by PostgreSQL committers
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep39 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed May 06, 2026