Optimizing PostgreSQL with Rust and Advanced Use Cases

Recently I was in need of a simple job queue for a Rust project. I already had Postgres in place and wondered if I could reuse it for this purpose. I found Tembo, a simple job queue written in Rust that uses Postgres as a backend. It fit the bill perfectly.

In today's episode, I talk to Adam Hendel, the founding engineer of Tembo, about their project, PGMQ, and how it came to be. We discuss the design decisions behind job queues, interfacing from Rust to Postgres, and the engineering decisions that went into building the extension.

It was delightful to hear that you could build all of this yourself, but that you would probably just waste your time doing so and would come up with the same design decisions as Adam and the team.

Tembo builds developer tools that help teams build and ship software faster. Their first product, PGMQ, was created to solve the problem of job queues in a simple and efficient way, leveraging the power of Postgres. They since made a pivot to focus on AI-driven code assistance, but PGMQ can be used independently and is available as an open-source project.

Adam Hendel is the founding engineer at Tembo, where he has been instrumental in developing PGMQ and other tools like pg_vectorize. He has since moved on to work on his own startup, but remains involved with the PGMQ project.