Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

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 Orac...

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 cho...

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. G...

Why does SQL feel so approachable to some developers, and why do some of them end up spending their careers in the data layer? In Episode 37 of Talking Postgres, Charles Feddersen , who leads product for Postgres at Microsoft, joins Claire to talk about building Postgres services on Azure. We explore his path from classic ASP apps on Microsoft Access to distributed Postgres with Citus, the moment...

Why would anyone willingly spend weeks chasing a slow query, knowing they might hit dead ends along the way? In Episode 36 of Talking Postgres, Tomas Vondra —Postgres committer and long‑time performance contributor—joins Claire to explain why hacking on Postgres performance is not just hard, but also fun. We dig into the process of investigating why queries are slow, how iteration and “wrong turns...

Are self-driving databases the Waymos of the future? In Episode 35 of Talking Postgres, Luigi Nardi —founder and CEO of DBtune and Stanford researcher—joins Claire Giordano to explore his journey from academic research to Level 5 autonomous database tuning. We dig into Luigi’s early days with a Commodore 64, how he began his PhD in Paris before he had learned to speak French, and how "professor pr...

What do conference planning, hacking weddings, and cat-free coding sessions have to do with Postgres? In Episode 34 of Talking Postgres, Melanie Plageman —Postgres committer and major contributor from Microsoft—joins Claire for a lively deep dive into what developers can expect at PGConf.dev 2026 as Postgres turns 30. We explore new content formats, the role of travel grants, why Tuesday becomes a...

What do guitar busking, geospatial queries, and agentic coding have to do with Postgres? In Episode 33 of Talking Postgres, principal engineer Rob Emanuele at Microsoft shares his winding path from Venice Beach to building a new VS Code extension for PostgreSQL—that works with any Postgres, anywhere. We dig into GitHub Copilot, ask vs. agent mode, and how Rob now codes in English—and then spends e...

What do chess clocks, jazz, and Postgres replication have in common? In Episode 32 of Talking Postgres, solution architect Boriss Mejías shares how the idea of “interconnectedness”—inspired by Douglas Adams—can help you untangle complex Postgres questions. We explore OpenAI’s approach to scaling Postgres, how Postgres active-active mirrors Sparta’s dual kingship, and how a holistic approach can re...

Six years, a prototype, and a brief multi-layered descent into “wronger and wronger” design—what does it take to land a major architectural change in Postgres? In Episode 31 of Talking Postgres , Andres Freund —major contributor, Postgres committer, and lead of the Asynchronous I/O project—shares the wins, the missteps, and why he thinks AIO definitely took too long. We dig into io_uring in Linux,...

Why do Postgres developers, contributors, and users do what they do? In each episode of Talking Postgres, Claire Giordano talks to people from across the Postgres ecosystem—how they got started, what they’ve learned, and what they’re still figuring out. This 3-minute trailer offers a fast-paced glimpse into the fun, surprising, and deeply human stories behind Postgres, including failures, wins, ob...

It’s always a good day if you see a pelican. In Episode 30 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , open source developer Simon Willison —creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django—joins to explore how AI is useful for data engineers today. We move past the hype and boosterism to dig into example after example: structured data extraction, alt text and accessibility, safety and security (aka t...

From dreaming of driving a bus to leading database engineering at Microsoft. In Episode 29 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , Shireesh Thota traces his path to becoming CVP of Azure databases—rooted in a love of math, early BASIC programming, and a certainty that he’d become an engineer. We dig into the shift from engineer to manager (if only people came with documentation); why it’s so im...

What drives someone to publish 600+ issues of a Postgres newsletter for over a decade? In Episode 28 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , Peter Cooper —creator of Postgres Weekly—shares how his days of rustic programming and QBASIC fanzines on Usenet led to a newsletter empire that now reaches nearly half a million developers each week. We dig into the BBC's "big tent" editorial influence, a...

How does a trek to K2 base camp in the Himalayas spark the idea for a database company? In Episode 27 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , guest Peter Farkas —CEO and co-founder of FerretDB—shares the origin story of this open source MongoDB alternative. (Spoiler: “Ferret” wasn’t the original name). We dig into why Postgres was the obvious choice, what “true open source” means to Peter, and...

What does it take to lead a global open source project like Postgres? In Episode 26 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , we sit down with Bruce Momjian —co-founder and core team member of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group—to explore the art of leadership in a volunteer-run open source community. Bruce shares what “servant leadership” really means; how saying I’m sorry can help make pro...

When I found out that Django developer and Python Software Foundation chair Dawn Wages has a chapter in her upcoming Domain-Driven Django book called “Just Use Postgres”, I knew we had to get her on the show. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , Dawn breaks down why so many Python and Django developers have such an affinity for Postgres. And we dive into the Djangonaut Space...

Nobody works on an open-source project forever—eventually, people move on. So of course today's Postgres contributors want to see more developers join the project, pick up the torch, and continue to make Postgres amazing. Hence the importance of mentorship. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , PostgreSQL major contributor and committer Robert Haas shares how he learned the ro...

March 5th 2005 at 3 PM in Copenhagen. That’s the exact time and place Daniel Gustafsson’s career took an unexpected turn, pivoting from operating systems to databases. At LinuxForum that day, Daniel had planned to meet up with the FreeBSD community, but a chance session about Postgres by Bruce Momjian completely blew his mind. By the time Daniel was on the train back to Malmö, he was already compi...

What’s it like to lead Postgres engineering at a cloud giant like Microsoft Azure? In this episode of Talking Postgres, host Claire Giordano chats with Affan Dar , VP of Engineering for Postgres at Microsoft. Affan’s team is behind the Azure Database for PostgreSQL managed service and also contributes extensively to the upstream Postgres open-source project. Affan walks us through his career journ...

Have you ever achieved something remarkable because someone planted an idea in your mind? In this episode of Talking Postgres, host Claire Giordano talks with Andrew Atkinson —a Rails developer and Postgres user whose journey to becoming a published author began with a simple seed of inspiration. Andrew’s story started with an internal presentation on how to tackle tricky scalability challenges in...

It was not Tom Lane’s plan to become a computer person. Tom’s plan was to be a pinball machine designer. And yet for the last 26 years Tom has been one of the most prolific engineering contributors to Postgres. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano , PostgreSQL luminary Tom Lane walks us through how he got his start as a developer and in Postgres—including his time working on de...

If you could work on anything, would you quit your job to pursue it? Postgres committer and major contributor Melanie Plageman joined Claire Giordano on this episode of the Talking Postgres podcast (formerly Path To Citus Con) to share her story about becoming a Postgres committer. Melanie pivoted from IT consulting to open-source development, driven by her fascination with systems engineering and...

Ever wonder how driving a forklift at a cheese factory could lead to a career in databases? Postgres committer David Rowley joined Claire Giordano on this episode of the Talking Postgres podcast (formerly Path To Citus Con) to share his story about how he got started as a developer and in Postgres. Could an unexpected job lead to your dream career? Does speeding things up give you a buzz? How coul...

Have you ever eavesdropped on other people’s conversations? Former co-host Pino de Candia joins Claire Giordano on this episode of Talking Postgres (formerly Path To Citus Con) to share their experience on podcasting about Postgres. Is listening to a podcast the next best thing to being in the hallway track at a conference? Does it bring the community together? How beneficial has it been to have a...