Hacking Postgres

Denis Magda is the mastermind behind the innovative extension PgCompute and a pivotal figure in the world of Postgres development. With over a decade and a half of experience, Denis cut his teeth on Postgres during its use in high-traffic social networking projects in Eastern Europe and has continued to push the envelope at Yugabyte as the head of Developer Relations.

In this episode we explore:

• The role of Yugabyte in the Postgres ecosystem
• The need for local development experiences
• A more 'magical' and testing-friendly approach to handling stored procedures
• The intersection of DevRel with sales engineering and marketing
• The future of Postgres in educational institutions

Links mentioned:

Business Wars podcast

Postgres FM

Founders podcast

Denis on X

Denis on LinkedIn

Yugabyte

Andrew Atkinson is a Software Engineer who specializes in building high-performance web applications using PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails. He wrote the book ‘High-Performance PostgreSQL for Rails’, published by Pragmatic Programmers in 2024.

Our discussion with Andrew spans the technical challenges of sharding and the concurrent evolution of Rails and Postgres. We'll pay homage to influential resources like Railscast, debate Rails' database tooling limitations, and discover tips from Andrew's new book.

In this episode we explore:

• Why newer developers favor Postgres over MySQL
• How Postgres might become a multi-primary database in the future
• The complexities of database decisions in a Rails environment
• Postgres innovations, such as composite primary keys and common table expressions, being supported from Active Record – the ORM for Ruby on Rails
• Key insights from writing ‘High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails’

Links mentioned:

Andrew Atkinson on LinkedIn

Andrew’s Blog

Newsletter

PGCasts

RailsCasts

‘High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails’ by Andrew Atkinson

Github rideshare

Postgres FM

Andrew Aktkinson’s interview on Postgres FM

Andrew Atkinson’s interview on Remote Ruby

Remote Ruby Podcast

GitHub doc: clarify logical decoding's deadlock of system tables

GitHub doc: Doc: fix grammatical errors for enable_partitionwise_aggregate 

GitHub Convert README to Markdown

Just describing something truly novel is challenging, let alone building it. That’s the story of our final episode from Season 1, where Ry sits down with Tim Sehn from Dolthub to talk about the journey of building Dolt, the new release of Doltgres, and the challenges of adapting to the changing ways users engage with your product. 

Build the thing you wish you had right now. That’s the story behind Hacking Postgres, Ep 9, where Ry sits down with Bertrand Drouvot of AWS Cloud. Today they talked about the struggles of trying to build from scratch vs having a template, what should be core vs an extension, and being able to see what’s really happening inside your database. 

Search is simple in theory. In practice? Anything but. Join Ry for Episode 8 of Hacking Postgres, where he sits down with Philippe Noël of ParadeDB to talk about how search is evolving, the influence of AI, and the lessons you'd tell your younger self.

Postgres for everything? How about building a new cloud provider? Join us for Ep 7 of Hacking Postgres where Ry talks with Burak Yucesoy of Ubicloud about new clouds, getting attached to extensions, and the future potential of Postgres.

Ever wonder what it's like to build a geospatial extension for PostgreSQL? Join us for Episode 6 of Hacking Postgres, where Ry sits down with Regina Obe and Paul Ramsey, two of the key creators of PostGIS.

In this episode, Ry and Alexander talk about OrioleDB (and the challenge of fighting bloat), fuzzy and vector search, and the challenges behind database management.

Pavlo Golub is the Co-Founder of PostgreSQL Ukraine and a PostgreSQL expert at Cybertec. Pavlo created pg_timetable, an advanced standalone job scheduler for Postgres. 

Eric Ridge is the primary developer of ZomboDB, “Making Postgres and Elasticsearch work together like it's 2023.” He’s also an active part of the pgrx and plrust teams.