Welcome back to More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions.

In this episode, JD talks with MotherDuck Co-Founder and CEO Jordan Tigani about how AI agents are starting to change the way teams explore and interact with data.

The conversation begins with a practical question: can AI actually help business users work directly with analytics without needing to know SQL? Jordan explains why newer agent-based systems behave differently from earlier natural language query tools. Instead of generating a single query and hoping for the best, these systems can iteratively inspect tables, test joins, explore schemas, and refine answers in ways that look much closer to how a human analyst works through a problem.

This episode is less about AI hype and more about the practical tension between automation, context, and how people actually use data inside real businesses.

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, JD talks with Ryan Booz from PG Analyze about a problem many PostgreSQL teams run into far too late: the visibility you need often is not enabled when things start going wrong.The conversation starts with logging and query optimization, but quickly expands into a bigger discussion around PostgreSQL’s configurability and why so many critical settings still feel hidden to everyday users. Ryan explains why teams regularly discover tools like pg_stat_statements only after performance issues appear, and why troubleshooting production systems often starts with realizing the data was never being collected in the first place.JD and Ryan also discuss conservative defaults, auto-tuning, and the tension between building PostgreSQL as a general-purpose product versus running PostgreSQL in real production environments. It becomes a broader conversation about observability, operational reality, and the growing number of companies building solutions around gaps the community still debates.📬 Ryan Booz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanbooz/💼 PG Analyze: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pganalyze/

In this episode, Bradon Rogers, Chief Customer Officer at Island, joins JD to break down how enterprise environments became so complex. Over the years, organizations have taken a consumer web browser and layered on proxies, VPNs, data loss prevention tools, and other controls to manage access and security.

The result is a fragmented stack that works for the organization, but often creates a poor experience for the end user.

Bradon explains why this approach persists and what happens when you shift the model. Instead of wrapping the browser with layers of infrastructure, the conversation explores what it looks like to move identity, context, and control directly into the browser itself, turning it into the point where application access is governed.

They also touch on practical implications, like separating personal and corporate activity and simplifying how users interact with both internal and external applications.

📬 Bradon Rogers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradon/

💼 Island: https://www.island.io/

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, Justin Graf and JD take on a long-standing issue in PostgreSQL: transaction IDs (XIDs) and what happens when they wrap around. Despite years of improvements, the system still relies on a 32-bit design that forces ongoing maintenance in high-volume databases.

This short session offers a practical look at why XIDs still matter and how they continue to shape performance and operations in modern Postgres environments.

In this episode, Joris Kuipers, CTO and hands-on architect, joins JD to talk about what it really means to grow as an engineer. As AI begins to take on more of the straightforward coding work, the conversation shifts to the skills that actually define long-term value.Joris explains why writing code is only one part of the job. Understanding customer problems, communicating effectively, and taking ownership of outcomes are what move engineers forward. The discussion also explores how to grow into leadership without losing touch with the technical side, and why that balance matters.

📬 Joris Kuper: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkuipers/

JD and Thomas Carnevale, Founder of Umbrella Security, get into how modern security infrastructure connects to questions around control, authority, and ownership. What begins with cameras, access control, and surveillance quickly turns into a discussion about who actually decides what we can access, what gets stored, and how those systems evolve over time.They also get into the tension between protection and control. Identity verification, monitoring, and centralized systems are often framed as necessary safeguards, but they also introduce new layers of dependency and influence.

It is a conversation about security, but also about control, trust, and what it means to actually own the systems you rely on.📲 Umbrella Security Systems: https://umbrellasecurity.com/

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, Greg Dostatni and JD take on a problem most teams run into early but rarely question: default configuration. PostgreSQL ships with hundreds of parameters, many of which are still based on assumptions from decades-old hardware. For new users, that doesn’t feel like flexibility, it feels like noise.Greg breaks down why this creates unnecessary complexity and why, in practice, most teams don’t need to understand all 400 settings. They need to understand the right ones. The conversation also touches on how this has become less of a technical limitation and more of a usability and community challenge over time.

Adding a column with a default value feels like a safe change. It is fast, avoids locking, and keeps things moving. But in Postgres, that speed comes from a tradeoff that can quietly affect performance later.Brian Fehrle, Database Administrator at Command Prompt, explains how Postgres handles these defaults without writing them to disk, and why that can leave the query planner working with incomplete information.In this episode, a real production case shows how queries that were once fast suddenly slowed down after a schema change, and how fixing it required more work than expected. It is a small decision with consequences that only show up when the system is under pressure.

In this episode, Denis Magda, author of Just Use Postgres, joins JD to talk about how PostgreSQL is often misunderstood. Many developers still approach Postgres as a traditional relational database, even though it has evolved far beyond that.

Denis shares how he personally rediscovered Postgres while exploring its modern capabilities, from native JSON support and full-text search to extensions for time-series and vector workloads. For many teams, these features are already available, but rarely used.

The idea behind “Just Use Postgres” is not about forcing a single solution. It’s a practical reminder: before introducing another database into your architecture, take a closer look at what Postgres can already handle.

Denis Magda: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmagda/Just Use Postgres!: https://www.manning.com/books/just-use-postgres

Welcome back to More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions.In this episode, Pauline Vos, software engineer and open source maintainer for MongoDB’s PHP ecosystem, breaks down a reality most teams overlook: the open source libraries your product depends on may be maintained by a single person with no long-term guarantees. What happens when that person steps away?Pauline explains why companies need to actively invest engineering resources into maintaining their surrounding open source ecosystem; not just for stability, but to reduce risk, improve developer experience, and build strategic relationships within key frameworks. From client libraries to community goodwill, this conversation reframes open source not as a dependency, but as part of the product itself.Whether you’re leading engineering, managing infrastructure, or building developer-facing tools, this episode highlights a critical shift: relying on open source isn’t enough, you have to support it.📲 Pauline Vos:https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulinepvos/