Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

Who knew an aptitude test could recommend a career as a DBA—and get it right? In Episode 44 of Talking Postgres, PostgreSQL significant contributor Karen Jex walks Claire through her path from Oracle DBA to Postgres consultant, solution architect, and now senior software engineer at Snowflake. My favorite bits: a project switched to Postgres when nobody knew how to install it, faking it as the Postgres expert, and the culture shock of building your own HA and backups. Plus: the warm welcome at PGConf EU 2019 that pulled Karen into the Postgres community; the new Buddy Program at PGConf EU 2026; and moving to the French Alps for the love of mountain biking.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres podcast Ep39: From MemSQL to HorizonDB, an engineer's journey with Adam Prout
• Talking Postgres podcast Ep42: How AI is changing software development with Simon Willison

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Conference: PGConf.EU 2026 in Valencia on 20-23 Oct
• Save the date for: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2027, happening 30 & 31 March 2027
• Two days this time: FOSDEM PGDay 2027, happening 28 & 29 Jan 2027
• Conference: PGConf.dev 2027 in Montréal
• Conference: PG Day France
• Conference: PGConf India 2027, on 2-5 March 2027
• Conference: EuroPython 2026
• PGConf.EU conference talk: Tuning Postgres for Analytics, by Karen Jex
• DjangoCon Europe 2024 keynote: When I Grow Up I Want to be a Database Administrator, by Karen Jex
• POSETTE speaker page: Karen Jex, with videos of her talks
• PGConf.EU 2023 talk: Elephant in a nutshell - Navigating the Postgres community 101, by Valeria Kaplan
• FOSDEM 2020 talk slides: Fibonacci Spirals and 21 Ways to Contribute to Postgres—Beyond Code, by Claire Giordano
• PostgreSQL.org: Contributor Profiles
• PostgreSQL Europe: PostgreSQL Europe board
• PostgreSQL docs: PostgreSQL 19 release notes
• Voice dictation: Wispr Flow
• Voice dictation: FluidVoice

In this episode, we covered:

00:00 Intro & music

01:55 Becoming a DBA completely by accident

05:46 "You're the database expert. You can figure it out."

12:37 Leaving Oracle, where everything comes bundled

17:23 From DBA to helping other DBAs

21:48 The PGDay France meeting that opened up the community

28:02 Why Django developers love Postgres

34:36 Stepping back to be close to home

43:54 "When I grow up, I want to be a DBA," said no one ever

51:42 How much should you delegate to AI agents?

59:22 Thirty five buddy pairings at PGConf EU

How does a fix for psql tab completion turn into 25 years of contributing to Postgres? In Episode 43 of Talking Postgres, Peter Eisentraut—PostgreSQL committer, core team member, SQL standards contributor, and Chief Architect of Database Servers at EDB—joins Claire to trace that journey. We dig into how scratch-your-own-itch development drew him in, why “the things you do, people welcome them” kept him coming back, and how Postgres changed as it grew from a small database community into a massive ecosystem where, from the Postgres mailing list perspective, “most of the user base is silent.” Plus: what it feels like when code you commit goes straight to everybody who uses Postgres, and the implications of the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres podcast Ep24: Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas
• Talking Postgres podcast Ep26: Open Source Leadership with Bruce Momjian
• Talking Postgres podcast Ep32: The Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things with Boriss Mejías

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Conference: FOSDEM 2027
• LinkedIn: FOSDEM PGDay 2027 announcement
• Conference: Prague PostgreSQL Developers Day (P2D2)
• Conference: PGDay Lowlands 2026 (the “friendliest” conference)
• Conference: PGConf EU 2026 in Valencia on 20-23 Oct
• PGConfEU Conference talk: What does the EU Cyber Resilience Act mean for PostgreSQL and its community
• Wikipedia: EU Cyber Resilience Act
• PGConf.dev on LinkedIn: PGConf.dev account
• PGConf.dev conference talk: Committer Review: An Exercise in Paranoia, by Robert Haas
• PostgreSQL.org: Committers
• PostgreSQL mailing list: Postgres 19 release management team
• Blog: Peter Eisentraut Blog
• Blog post: Where are all the PostgreSQL users, by Peter Eisentraut 
• PGCA non-profit: PostgreSQL Community Association
• Brett Cannon at PyCon 2014: I came for the language but I stayed for the community 
• Planet PostgreSQL: Blog aggregation feed

In this episode, we covered:

00:00 Intro & music

02:14 Tinkering with the Commodore 64 

07:57 The itch that became psql tab completion

15:43 Had to make opportunities

23:05 From posting at night to posting during the day

24:40 Why he stopped committing in the afternoon

28:04 On the ground floor of something that grew

30:34 What the Postgres core team actually does

31:47 Borrowing ideas from other OSS projects

36:51 Bringing Postgres into the SQL standards process

38:40 Getting to hang out with database nerds

42:01 Mentoring Postgres contributors

50:56 Making time for Postgres conferences

53:35 What the Cyber Resilience Act means for Postgres

57:36 Where are all the Postgres users?

1:07:00 Becoming a committer early on in Postgres

1:16:22 Contributing to Postgres isn't just writing code

1:19:40 Why FOSDEM is still his favorite

1:22:15 Finding familiar problems in a compiler devroom

1:26:14 Shout-out to the Planet Postgres feed

What’s your gold standard for deciding whether AI-written code is ready for production? In Episode 42 of Talking Postgres, Simon Willison—creator of Datasette, co-creator of Django, and prolific open-source developer—joins Claire to share how AI is changing the way he builds software today. We dig into why his test for shipping AI-generated code is “Could I explain this to somebody else?”, how engineering management skills can be surprisingly useful when managing AI agents, and how the bottleneck is no longer writing code but understanding it. Also: personal credibility, deep research, the Winchester Mystery House, slop proxies, and Simon’s observation that “Features are cheap. That doesn’t mean you should build them all.”

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres podcast Ep 30: AI for data engineers with Simon Willison 

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Blog: Simon Willison’s Blog
• Project page: Datasette, for finding stories in data
• GitHub repo: sqlite-utils
• Blog post: Release of alchemy-utils 0.1a0 (featuring Postgres & DuckDB)
• Blog post: There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text, by Sophie Alpert
• Podcast episode: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison, on Oxide and Friends
• Podcast episode: An AI state of the union, on Lenny’s Podcast 
• Wikipedia: Winchester Mystery House
• Idea in Mythical Man-Month: Conceptual integrity
• Blog post: SQLite compressed text-history prototypes, by Simon Willison
• Tools: Simon’s miscellaneous tools repo

In this episode, we covered:

00:00 Intro & music

04:00 A week of work before breakfast

09:12 Red-green TDD makes agents exercise every line

14:42 A million lines mean nothing if you don’t understand it

18:28 Finding low-hanging fruit among open PRs & issues

22:07 Getting work done while walking the dog

23:01 Gold standard: “Could I explain this to somebody else?”

28:27 Slop proxies add no value at all

30:49 Aggressive nitpicking reviews

35:01 Everything in software engineering is about trade-offs

41:16 Racoon heist game is only fun for 1 minute 15 seconds

43:46 New Year’s resolution to be more ambitious

48:11 You have to learn to throw things away

51:57 Features are cheap. That doesn’t mean you should build them all

1:00:45 Engineering management skills are so useful

1:04:44 QA specialists should be having a great time

1:07:53 Writing is thinking, don’t outsource it

1:08:23 Skill atrophy is a choice you make

1:10:07 I believe in people who are motivated

1:11:55 Systems are not set up to deal with this volume

1:18:48 Research agents stopped being absolute garbage

1:21:49 The whole point of the “human in the loop”

1:26:10 Dream: I want there to be more small businesses

What happens when a database engineer spends 13 years on SQL Server and then starts working on Postgres? In Episode 41 of Talking Postgres, Distinguished Engineer Panagiotis “Panos” Antonopoulos of Microsoft joins Claire to share what surprised him most about making that transition. We explore why Postgres felt familiar from the start—and what shocked Panos about the clean and lean Postgres codebase. We also dig into how public mailing lists and AI can help explain why design decisions were made, why more people are asking “why not Postgres?”, and the shared-storage architecture behind Azure HorizonDB.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep 39: From MemSQL to HorizonDB, an engineer's journey with Adam Prout
• Talking Postgres Ep 38: How I went from Oracle to Postgres (with a big NoSQL detour) with Gwen Shapira
• Talking Postgres Ep 40: How I got started running a Postgres user group with Jeremy Schneider

Links mentioned in this episode:

• SIGMOD: ACM SIGMOD-PODS Conference 2027  
• CMUDB talk: HorizonDB: Co-Designing Postgres and Azure for Cloud-Native OLTP, by Adam Prout
• PostgreSQL mailing list: pgsql-hackers
• PostgreSQL docs: pg_stat_slru (simple least-recently-used)
• Docs: Azure HorizonDB
• Poster: Postgres Happiness Hints

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 Oracle—and why "it's like I was born to be here." Plus: the newly-updated Postgres Happiness Hints poster, advice for starting your own user group, and his POSETTE 2026 talk on CloudNativePG.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep 38: How I went from Oracle to Postgres (with a big NoSQL detour) with Gwen Shapira

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Seattle Postgres User Group: Meetup page
• Seattle Postgres User Group: YouTube channel
• User Group Map from PGConfEU 2025 talk: 48 Postgres User Groups during PG18 timeframe
• PostgreSQL.org: Listing of local Postgres User Groups
• Postgres Meetup For All (a virtual meetup): Meetup page
• Jeremy Schneider’s Blog: Ardent Performance Computing
• Poster: Postgres Happiness Hints
• PGConf.dev 2026: Posters from Poster Session
• PGConf.dev 2026 Poster Session: Talking Postgres poster
• POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026: Jeremy’s POSETTE 2026 talk with Leonardo Cecchi
• POSETTE 2026: Livestream 3 schedule & talks
• Oracle docs: Oracle Database Concepts PDF
• Book: Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table

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 chose Rust; and what “good systems programming” looks like when being paranoid is a feature, not a bug. Along the way: startup vs big company tradeoffs, and how working on databases exposes you to so many interesting parts of computer science.  

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep29: How I got started leading database teams with Shireesh Thota

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Blog post: Announcing Azure HorizonDB, by Charles Feddersen & Affan Dar
• CMUDB talk: HorizonDB: Co-Designing Postgres and Azure for Cloud-Native OLTP, by Adam Prout
• Research paper: Socrates: The New SQL Server in the Cloud
• Product page: Azure HorizonDB
• Video of POSETTE 2025 talk: Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI
• Blog post: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users, by Bohan Zhang
• Blog post: Supporting ChatGPT on PostgreSQL in Azure, by Affan Dar, Adam Prout, & Panagiotis Antonopoulos 
• Docs: Azure Database for PostgreSQL
• GitHub repo: pgrx
• Discord: PostgreSQL Hacking server
• Conference: PGConf.dev 2026
• Conference Schedule: PGConf.dev 2026 Schedule

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. Gwen shares how she spun up on Postgres after years with other databases (shout-out to the Happiness Hints and a strong sense of curiosity), and why Postgres has made her appreciate Codd. We also touch on blogging as a career catalyst, the upcoming PGConf.dev conference (where a lot of PG20 work gets discussed, and where we’ll celebrate 30 years of Postgres)—and the #1 rule of consulting: it’s always the consultant’s fault.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep15: My Journey to Explaining Explain with Michael Christofides
• Talking Postgres Ep24: Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas
• Talking Postgres Ep30: AI for data engineers with Simon Willison

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Gwen’s company: Nile
• Ardent Performance Computing blog: PostgreSQL Happiness Hints
• Book: Just Use Postgres! by Denis Magda
• GitHub repo: HypoPG
• Wikipedia page: Codd’s 12 rules
• Blog post: Transaction Isolation in Postgres, by Gwen Shapira
• Podcast: Postgres.FM
• Discord server: PostgreSQL Hacking 

Upcoming conferences & talks mentioned:

• Conference: PGConf.dev 2026 on May 19-22 in Vancouver Canada
• Conference Schedule: PGConf.dev 2026 schedule
• CFP deadline: PGConf.dev Community Discussion Sessions deadline on 14 Apr 2026
• Conference: PGConf EU 2026 in Valencia Spain
• LinkedIn post: PGConf.dev 2026 conference t-shirt, celebrating 30 years of Postgres
• POSETTE 2026 talk: The Rise of PostgreSQL as the Everything Database, by Varun Dhawan
• PGConf.dev 2026 Panel: Real-Time Patch Idea Evaluation
• PGConf.dev 2026 Roundtable: Unexpected Successes & Epic Failures by PostgreSQL committers

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 he installed pgAdmin and got pulled deeper into Postgres, and what it takes to build for the many different ways people rely on Postgres today—from Flexible Server and Azure HorizonDB to developer tooling—and why it’s important to support the upstream Postgres open source project.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Ep 22: Leading engineering for Postgres on Azure with Affan Dar: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/leading-engineering-for-postgres-on-azure-with-affan-dar
• Ep29: How I got started leading database teams with Shireesh Thota https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/how-i-got-started-leading-database-teams-with-shireesh-thota

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Video of CMUDB talk: HorizonDB: Co‑Designing PostgreSQL and Azure for Cloud‑Native OLTP, by Adam Prout
• Video of talk: Azure HorizonDB: Deep Dive into a New Enterprise-Scale PostgreSQL, by Adam Prout & Denzil Ribeiro
• Talk at SCALE 23x: Did VS Code Quietly Become a Go-To Postgres Tool?, by Phil Vacca 
• Visual Studio Code Marketplace: VS Code extension for PostgreSQL
• Docs: Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server
• GitHub repo: Citus open source
• Postgres extension: PostGIS
• Conference: PGConf India 2026

Upcoming conferences & talks mentioned:

• Conference: PGConf.dev 2026 in Vancouver Canada
• Conference: Microsoft Build 2026
• Keynote at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026: Driving Postgres forward at Microsoft
• POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026: Schedule
• Conference: Postgres Summit US 2026 (formerly PGConf NYC)
• Conference: PGConf EU 2026 in Valencia

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 part of performance work, and why Tomas prefers meaningful performance puzzles over toy problems. Along the way, we talk about using benchmarks to build an understanding of a problem. Tomas also shares how even small changes in code can have outsized impact when that code is used a lot, and how the mathematics embedded in the Postgres query planner/executor makes the work especially rewarding.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep31: What went wrong (& what went right) with AIO with Andres Freund
• Talking Postgres Ep24: Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas

Links mentioned in this episode:

• PGConf.dev 2026: Schedule
• GitHub repo: PostgreSQL Monthly Hacking Workshop, organized by Robert Haas 
• Nordic PGDay 2026: Tomas talk on approximating percentiles
• Video of POSETTE 2025 talk: Performance Archaeology – 20 years of improvements
• Video of PGConf EU 2025 talk: Fast-path locking improvements in PG18
• Conference: Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day
• Discord: PostgreSQL Hacking Discord
• GitHub repo: tvondra/tdigest
• Brendan Gregg’s site: perf Linux profiler examples
• Docs: pgbench for running benchmarks on PostgreSQL
• Blog: Tomas Vondra blog
• Postgres Patch Ideas: List on Tomas Vondra blog

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 privilege" in Sweden helped him bootstrap his startup. You’ll learn why the DBtune team chose database tuning and Postgres as their focus, what the Jevons paradox means for the future of developers, and how the “Level 5” vision fuels the DBtune team’s work toward a truly self-driving system.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep30: AI for data engineers with Simon Willison
• Talking Postgres Ep23: How I got started as a developer & in Postgres with Daniel Gustafsson

Links mentioned in this episode:

• CFP: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026’s CFP closes on Sun Feb 1, 2026 @ 11:59pm PST
• Video of POSETTE 2024 talk: Autotuning PostgreSQL on Azure Flexible Server, by Luigi Nardi
• Video of PGConf India 2025 talk: ML for Systems and Systems for ML, by Luigi Nardi
• PGConf India 2025: Round Table Discussion about AI
• Oxide and Friends podcast: Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age
• Wikipedia: Jevons paradox
• Wikipedia: Neuro-symbolic AI
• Conference: PGDay Lowlands (Boriss Mejías calls it the second-best Postgres conference in Europe)