Postgres and Open Source Experts

In the 2017 article we referenced to /r/postgresql which at the time had 5,100 members. It now has 25.5k. In the same time period as pgsql-general, it generated 175 messages among community members (20 posts, 155 responses). Similarly, we mentioned the Slack channel which at the time had 1100+ members. It now hosts 18.3k subscribers with similar activity of the subreddit. The People, Postgres, Data Discord, which did not exist in 2017, has 3,579 members and is quite active over its 28 channels. The listed collaboration venues don’t take into account the thousands of members among the international or associated (Brazil, Russia, TimescaleDB, Yugabyte, NeonDB, etc…) Postgres communities.

On Thursday and Friday of this week we will be enjoying 90 degree weather and sunshine in San Jose, California. It will be quite the change from the dark and damp of NW Washington. This is also the first time I will have been on an airplane in almost 3 years. Yes, it really has been that long since the world decided to begin a pandemic. That said, I am …

Over the last 25 years we have interviewed hundreds of people to be a part of our team. As with any good interview, you allow candidates to ask questions about the business, how you operate, what your philosophy looks like, and hopefully what your plan for the future is. My favorite is, “What is something you tell every employee?” Our answer is always the same, “We are never afraid to fire a client” and the response is almost universally “that’s refreshing.”

I had an opportunity to sit down with Mark Porter, the CTO of MongoDB to discuss PostgreSQL, Aurora PostgreSQL and MongoDB. Mark is one of the creators of Aurora PostgreSQL and now enjoys a leadership role at MongoDB. There are two episodes:

• Engineering Culture
• The aha moment

It is important to reach out to leaders in communities to understand how they succeed. Mark has over 30 years of experience in …

As North America starts to reopen, the PostgresWorld webinar series continues to provide exceptional free content to the community. See below for the August webinars.

In many Open Source communities it is difficult to consider who a contributor is. Some projects take an exclusive view, requiring a direct contribution to be made to be considered a contributor. Looking at this holistically, we find that the success of a project is found only when there is a mutual connection between the hands-on team and those who support it.Without that connection, PostgreSQL would just be a fever …

A couple of our recent podcasts are directly related to PostgreSQL, they are listed below. I have really enjoyed meeting the people behind the technology that drives PostgreSQL in the global community. A lot of us are used to collectively gathering a few times a year with conferences. Obviously the pandemic has put a halt to that but launching the podcast has allowed me to connect with some amazing folks.

I had the opportunity to speak with Karthik Ranganathan of YugabyteDB a couple of weeks ago; he was the inaugural guest for our new podcast, “More than a Refresh: A podcast about data and people who wrangle it.” Karthik is the CTO and one of the Founders of YugabyteDB. He provided an interesting perspective on Open Source and the license changes of other database companies. YugabyteDB is a …

The community has spent a lot of time optimizing features over the years. Excellent examples include parallel query and partitioning which have been multi-year efforts to increase the quality, performance, and extend features of the original commit. We should consider the documentation in a similar manner. Just like code, documentation can sometimes use a bug fix, optimization, and/or new features added to the original implementation.

Technical documentation should only be …

I am on the phone with Eric Ridge of ZomboDB and PGX fame. We chat often on the People, Postgres, Data Discord server (yes you should join) and we have unofficial “we are human so we get on the phone” calls about twice a month. The calls are generally about PostgreSQL and the awesome Open Source projects he is building around our famed database. However, on this call I got a question I don’t normally get: how good is your SQL?