Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

Did you know that sometimes the fastest way of doing something is not having to do it at all? In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres, Michael Christofides joins Claire Giordano to chat about his journey to explaining explain (or should we say EXPLAIN!?) Michael shared his origin story as a mathematician and his first experience with Postgres before walking us through co-founding a Postgres company and now co-hosting a podcast. Like many in the Postgres community, he is opinionated in the best way possible! We even learned about his passion for BUFFERS and why he believes everyone should use them. This session also dives into Michael’s belief in the importance of Postgres documentation. Because great documentation can be worth its weight in Gold, especially when the going gets tough.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Schedule for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2024
• Michael Christofides' company, pgMustard
• Blog: Where our name came from by Michael Christofides
• Wiki: Using EXPLAIN
• X: Nikolay Samokhvalov
• Video: Lightning Talks at pgDay Paris 2024
• Blog: What’s new with Postgres at Microsoft (August 2023) by Claire Giordano
• Blog: Faster PostgreSQL Counting by Joe Nelson
• GitHub: pg_docs_bot (browser extension)
• GitHub Docs: About GitHub Copilot Chat
• Documentation: Using EXPLAIN
• Glossary: EXPLAIN Glossary by Michael Christofides
• Video: EXPLAIN Explained by Josh Berkus
• Blog: Reading a Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE Query Plan by Caleb Hearth
• Blog: Explaining the unexplainable by Depesz
• PostgreSQL execution plan visualizer, explain.dalibo.com
• Blog: Planet PostgreSQL
• News: Postgres Weekly
• Playlist: 5mins of Postgres
• Podcast: Postgres FM podcast
• Cal invite for next Ep16 of Path To Citus Con podcast with Aaron Wislang & Teresa Giacomini

Lots of stories of how folks got started as developers! Andres Freund and Heikki Linnakangas join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore more paths for getting into Postgres on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. How do you do development: with a cup of coffee, with music in the background, maybe at 3am? How do you approach mentoring other developers? Why did you stick with Postgres and make it a career? Lots of lively discussion about building not only code, but relationships in the community, in the open. Also, stories about Heikki’s and Andres’s first Postgres patch submissions, and working via the hackers mailing list. Finally, what advice would you give to your younger self starting in the development world?

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:

• Neon: https://neon.tech/
• Rob Conery and Scott Hanselman's book: The Imposter's Handbook (https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/1610805353255677953)
• Path To Citus Con Ep04: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/how-i-got-started-as-a-developer-in-postgres
• Andres’ first patch to Postgres: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=c43feefa806c81d68115ed03a7f723720cefad31
• PGConf NYC 2023: https://2023.pgconf.nyc/
• Flow book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Flow/QVjPsd1UukEC
• Archives of Postgres hackers mailing list: https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/
• List of Postgres Contributors: https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
• Description of Postgres Core Team: https://www.postgresql.org/developer/core/
• Postgres Weekly newsletter: https://postgresweekly.com/

Everyone learns differently. Grant Fritchey and Ryan Booz, database advocates at Redgate focusing on PostgreSQL, talk with Path To Citus Con* co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the learning resources available to developers and users in all the corners of the PostgreSQL world. What drives you to learn: need or curiosity? What can podcasts teach us while we bike to work? Are conference talks good for growing skills, or are they better for networking? What about books? And do older books still have much to offer? It turns out, most people need much more than one approach to build their knowledge.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Some of the (many) links shared in the order they were mentioned:

• Talk: Ryan’s talk Point-in-time query tuning and observability with pg_stat_statements at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2022
• Blog: Learning PostgreSQL with Grant, a series for SQL Server devs learning about Postgres
• Podcast: postgres.fm, a weekly podcast about all things Postgres
• Podcast: Path To Citus Con Episode 01: Working in public on open source
• Blog aggregator: Planet PostgreSQL
• Email Newsletters: Cooperpress, including the Postgres Weekly email
• Podcast: Scaling PostgreSQL with Creston Jamison
• User Groups: PostgreSQL Community User Groups
• Videos: pganalyze "5 minutes of Postgres," by Lukas Fittl
• Book: The Art of PostgreSQL, by Dimitri Fontaine
• Book: PostgreSQL Query Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Building Efficient Queries, by Henrietta Dombrovskaya
• Book: SQL Performance Explained, by Markus Winand
• Blog: Modern SQL, by Markus Winand
• Blog: Use The Index, Luke, by Markus Winand
• Book: Database Administration, by Craig Mullins
• Book: A Curious Moon, by Rob Conery
• Book: The Little SQL Book, by Rob Conery, “Learn SQL While Watching Football This Weekend - Free!”
• Event: PGDay Chicago
• Blog: Redgate – Simple Talk
• Videos: CMU Database Group’s Talks on YouTube: Quarantine (2020), First Dose (2021), Second Dose (2021), Booster (2022)
• Crunchy Data’s Postgres Playground
• Blog: CYBERTEC
• Blog: Citus Open Source Blog
• Talk: How To Make Your Postgres Blog Posts Reach A Ton More People, by Claire Giordano
• Conference: PGCon 2023, super useful to watch recorded talks after the fact
• Con...

Join Claire and Pino as they talk with Citus and Postgres open source team members to explore how to get Postgres ready for the next 100 million users. What will future Postgres users look like? How will the Postgres development process evolve with more users? What are the common challenges faced by Postgres users?

Citus open source team members Abdullah Ustuner and Burak Yucesoy are joined by Postgres open source teammates Melanie Plageman and Samay Sharma—and co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia—in this episode of Path To Citus Con*. Listen to the deep dive on what it means to scale the code and the community far beyond the Postgres world of today.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Some links from the show in the order they were mentioned:

• Additional IO Observability in Postgres: Melanie's talk at Citus Con 2023
• Optimizing Postgres for write heavy workloads ft. Checkpoint and WAL configs: Samay's talk at Citus Con 2023
• The Design of Postgres, by Michael Stonebraker and Lawrence A. Rowe, 1986
• HyperLogLog
• PostGIS
• timescale/pgspot

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 desktop calculators at HP. And how he has code running on Mars (and most of us don’t.) During Tom’s PhD studies at Carnegie Mellon, nobody told him databases were so interesting! It wasn’t until Tom needed a database to store stock trading information that he first got to work with Postgres. And that’s when Tom’s 26-year-long (and counting) Postgres story began.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Wikipedia: Tom Lane (computer scientist)
• Wikipedia: HP 9800 series
• CMU CS Department Coke Machine history
• Wikipedia: Honeywell 316
• Wikipedia: Teletype Model 33
• Wikipedia: Hydra (operating system)
• Wikipedia: William Wulf
• Wikipedia: Jon Bentley (computer scientist)
• Wikipedia: Mary Shaw (computer scientist)
• Wikipedia: Usenet
• GitHub: postgres commit by tglsfdc
• Article: The Mars 2020 Engineering Cameras and Microphone on the Perseverance Rover: A Next-Generation Imaging System for Mars Exploration by J.N. Maki et al.
• Blog: Open Source on Mars: Community powers NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter by Klint Finley
• PostgreSQL Mailing List message: pg_upgrade --check fails to warn about abstime
• PostgreSQL: Core Team
• postgresql.git: commitdiff
• Blog: Proton to Fastmail by Tristan Partin
• Talking Postgres Ep18: How I got started as a dev (& in Postgres) with David Rowley
• PGConf EU 2024: Conference Schedule
• PGConf NYC 2024: Conference Schedule
• Talking Postgres Ep19: Becoming a Postgres committer with Melanie Plageman
• PostgreSQL: Commitfests
• Wikipedia: Cutting room floor
• PostgreSQL Mailing List message: Straight-from-the-horses-mouth dept
• PostgreSQL Mailing List message: [PATCH] Extend ALTER OPERATOR to support adding commutator, negator, hashes, and merges