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-threaded: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/31cc6df9-53fe-3cd9-af5b-ac0d801163f4%40iki.fi 
Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36284487 

Follow Heikki: 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heikki-linnakangas-6b58bb203/ 
Website: https://neon.tech 

Follow Aaron: 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis 
Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more.

Database school on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI72dgeNJtzqElnNB6sQoAn2R-F3Vqm15
Database school audio only: https://databaseschool.transistor.fm 

00:00 - Introduction and Heikki's background 
01:19 - How Heikki got into Postgres 
03:17 - First major patch: two-phase commit 
04:00 - Governance and decision-making in Postgres 
07:00 - Committer consensus and decentralization 
09:25 - Attracting new contributors 
11:25 - Founding Neon with Nikita Shamgunov 
13:01 - Why separation of compute and storage matters 
15:00 - Write-ahead log and architectural insights 
17:03 - Early days of building Neon 
20:00 - Building the control plane and user-facing systems 
21:28 - What "serverless Postgres" really means 
23:39 - Reducing cold start time from 5s to 700ms 
25:05 - Storage architecture and page servers 
27:31 - Who uses sleepable databases 
28:44 - Multi-tenancy and schema management 
31:01 - Role in low-code/AI app generation 
33:04 - Branching, time travel, and read replicas 
36:56 - Real-time point-in-time query recovery 
38:47 - Large customers and scaling in Neon 
41:04 - Heikki’s favorite Neon feature: time travel 
41:49 - Making Postgres multi-threaded 
45:29 - Why it matters for connection scaling 
50:50 - The next five years for Postgres and Neon 
52:57 - Final thoughts and where to find Heikki