Database School

Hunter Leath, CEO of Archil, explains how they’re building a “universal storage engine” that sits between your apps and S3—making an S3 bucket behave like a fast, POSIX-compatible disk for containers, servers, and even Lambda. Along the way, we dig into how their SSD-backed clusters and custom protocol avoid the usual small-file pain and where this approach shines (and where it doesn’t). Follow Hu...

Hammad Bashir, CTO of Chroma, joins the show to break down how modern vector search systems are actually built from local, embedded databases to massively distributed, object-storage-backed architectures. We dig into Chroma’s shared local-to-cloud API, log-structured storage on object stores, hybrid search, and why retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) isn’t going anywhere. Follow Hammad: Twitter/X...

In this episode of Database School, Aaron Francis sits down with Jordan Tigani, co-founder and CEO of MotherDuck, to break down what DuckDB is, how MotherDuck hosts it in the cloud, and why analytics workloads are shifting toward embedded databases. They dig into Duck Lake, pricing models, scaling strategies, and what it really takes to build a modern cloud data warehouse. Follow Jordan: Twitter/X...

In this episode, Aaron talks with Dennis Magda, author of Just Use Postgres!, about the wide world of modern Postgres, from JSON and full-text search to generative AI, time-series storage, and even message queues. They explore when Postgres should be your go-to tool, when it shouldn’t, and why understanding its breadth helps developers build better systems. Use the code DBSmagda to get 45% off Den...

In this episode, Gajus Kuizinas, co-founder and CTO of Contra, joins Aaron to talk about building the engineering world you want to live in, from strict runtime-validated SQL with Slonik to creating high-ownership engineering cultures. They dive into developer experience, runtime assertions, SafeQL, and even “Loom-driven development,” a powerful review process that lets teams move fast without bre...

In this episode, Aaron Francis talks with Simon Eskildsen, co-founder and CEO of TurboPuffer, about building a high-performance search engine and database that runs entirely on object storage. They dive deep on Simon's time as an engineer at Shopify, database design trade-offs, and how TurboPuffer powers modern AI workloads like Cursor and Notion. Follow Simon: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sirupse...

Aaron talks with Ovais Tariq, co-founder and CEO of Tigris Data and former Uber engineer who helped scale one of the world’s largest distributed systems. They discuss Uber’s hyperscale infrastructure, what it takes to build an S3-compatible object store from scratch, and how distributed storage is evolving for the AI era. Follow Ovais: Twitter: https://twitter.com/ovaistariq LinkedIn: https://www....

In this episode of Database School, Aaron talks with Preston Thorpe, a senior engineer at Turso who is currently incarcerated, about his incredible journey from prison to rewriting SQLite in Rust. They dive deep into concurrent writes, MVCC, and the challenges of building a new database from scratch while discussing redemption, resilience, and raw technical brilliance. Follow Preston and Turso: Li...

In this episode, Aaron talks with Joran Greef, CEO and creator of TigerBeetle, the world’s first financial transactions database. Joran takes us on a deep dive of on how TigerBeetle brings double-entry accounting principles directly into the database layer to achieve extreme correctness, performance, and fault tolerance at scale. Follow Joran and TigerBeetle: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/jorandi...

Sam Lambert, my former boss at PlanetScale, talks to me about PlanetScale moving from a MySQL company to now also having a Postgres offering. Sam shares why PlanetScale decided to move to Postgres, how MySQL and Postgres are different at a technical level, and how the change has impacted the company culture. Stay to the end for a special surprise! PlanetScale Metal Episode: https://youtu.be/3r9PsV...

Marcel Kornacker , the creator of Apache Impala and co-creator of Apache Parquet, joins me to talk about his latest project: Pixeltable , a multimodal AI database that combines structured and unstructured data with rich, Python-native workflows. From ingestion to vector search, transcription to snapshots, Pixeltable eliminates painful data plumbing for modern AI teams. Follow Marcel Pixeltable: ht...

I chat with Lev Kokotov to talk about building PgDog , an open-source sharding solution for Postgres that sits outside the database. Lev shares the journey from creating PgCat to launching PgDog through YC, the technical challenges of sharding, and why he believes scaling Postgres shouldn’t require extensions or rewrites. Follow Lev: Twitter: https://twitter.com/levpgdog PgDog: https://pgdog.dev F...

Want to learn more about SQLite?   Check out my course on SQLite: https://highperformancesqlite.com/?ref=yt   In this episode of Database School, I chat with Glauber Costa, CEO of Turso, about their audacious decision to rewrite SQLite from the ground up.   We cover the technical motivations, open contribution philosophy, and how deterministic simulation testing is unlocking new levels of reliabil...

Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creator of Vitess and co-founder of PlanetScale, joins me to talk about his time scaling YouTube’s database infrastructure, building Vitess, and his latest project bringing sharding to Postgres with Multigres. This was a fun conversation with technical deep-dives, lessons from building distributed systems, and why he’s joining Supabase to tackle this next big challenge. Sugu’...

In this episode, I chat with Richard Crowley from PlanetScale about their new offering: PlanetScale Metal . We dive deep into the performance and reliability trade-offs of EBS vs. locally attached NVMe storage, and how Metal delivers game-changing speed for MySQL workloads. Links: Database School: https://databaseschool.com PlanetScale: https://planetscale.com PlanetScale Metal: https://planetscal...

Johannes Schickling, original founder of Prisma, joins me to talk about LiveStore , his ambitious local-first data layer designed to rethink how we build apps from the data layer up. We dive deep into event sourcing, syncing with SQLite, and why this approach might power the next generation of reactive apps. 🔗 Links Mentioned Want to learn more about SQLite? Check out my SQLite course: https://hi...

Josh Howard, Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudflare, joins me to explain how Durable Objects and D1 work under the hood—and why Cloudflare’s approach to stateful serverless infrastructure is so unique. We get into V8 isolates, replication models, routing strategies, and even upcoming support for containers.  Want to learn more about SQLite? Check out my SQLite course: https://highperformancesqli...

In this episode of Database School, I talk with Heikki Linnakangas, co-founder of Neon and longtime PostgreSQL hacker, to talk about 20+ years in the Postgres community, the architecture behind Neon, and the future of multi-threaded Postgres. From paternity leave patches to branching production databases, we cover a lot of ground in this deep-dive conversation.  Links:  Let's make postgres multi-t...

Want to learn more SQLite? Check out my SQLite course: https://highperformancesqlite.com  In this episode, Carl Sverre and I discuss why syncing everything is a bad idea and how his new project, Graft, makes edge-native, partially replicated databases possible. We dig into SQLite, object storage, transactional guarantees, and why Graft might be the foundation for serverless database replicas.  SQL...

Prisma started as a GraphQL backend and pivoted into one of the most widely used ORMs in the world. Now, they’ve launched Prisma Postgres, and CEO Søren Bramer Schmidt is here to break down the journey, the challenges, and the massive technical innovations behind it—including bare-metal servers, Firecracker microVMs, and unikernels. If you care about databases, performance, or scaling, this one’s...

Want to learn more SQLite? Check out my SQLite course: https://highperformancesqlite.com  In this episode, I sit down with Mike Buckbee to dive into the nitty-gritty of web application firewalls and his journey from using Redis to SQLite in Wafris. We talk about database architecture, operational challenges, and the fascinating ways SQLite improves performance and usability in cybersecurity tools....

Want to learn more Postgres? Check out my Postgres course: https://masteringpostgres.com.  In this interview, I talk with Jesse Hanley, founder of Bento, about running a lean email service from Japan. We chat about the challenges of scaling infrastructure, managing databases, and maintaining a calm business while serving a global customer base.  Links Mentioned:  Bento: https://bentonow.com  Datab...

Want to learn more Postgres? Check out my Postgres course: https://masteringpostgres.com.  Production ready Postgres for teams that ship fast: https://xata.io In this interview, I talk with Monica Sarbu and Tudor Golubenco from Xata about their journey from Elastic to founding Xata. We deep dive on building a Postgres hosting platform, handling schema changes, and how they've made their free tier...

Want to learn more Postgres? Check out my Postgres course: https://masteringpostgres.com. In this interview, I dive deep with Craig Kerstiens from Crunchy Data into the world of Postgres, covering its rise to prominence, scaling at Heroku, and the power of Postgres extensions. Craig also shares insights on database sharding, the future of Postgres, and why developers love working with it. Follow C...

Want to learn more about SQLite? Check out the full course: https://highperformancesqlite.com Get production ready SQLite with Turso: https://tur.so/af . In this interview, I talk to Stephen Margheim about his work with SQLite and Ruby on Rails. Links: Database school on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI72dgeNJtzqElnNB6sQoAn2R-F3Vqm15 Database school audio only: https://databasesc...