Bruce Momjian joins us to explore why PostgreSQL continues to outpace proprietary databases - not just in features, but also in its development model and architecture.

We trace Postgres’s 39-year lineage - from its Berkeley origins and Michael Stonebraker’s vision for extensibility, through early debates about removing that extensibility, to the decades in which that design proved pivotal. That architecture has paid off repeatedly, enabling JSON/JSONB, full-text search, PostGIS, and pgvector to land at the right moments without upheaval. Bruce explains why transparent data encryption (TDE) hasn’t landed in core, when sharding actually helps versus scaling up, and how storage choices (latency, power-loss protection) shape performance; we also look at async I/O in Postgres 18, extension-friendly interfaces like table access methods, and what it means to stay ‘on the train’ within the community.

Topics include:

39-year history: Berkeley origins, Stonebraker’s vision for extensibility, and community longevity
The four motivations for open source contributors: puzzles, giving back, career growth, and need
Postgres’s extensibility: from an early burden to a superpower (PostGIS, full-text search, JSON/JSONB, pgvector)
Why TDE is hard in core: technical value versus code complexity
Scaling and storage: latency, power-loss protection, and async I/O in Postgres 18
Aurora/Neon and decoupled storage/compute: niche wins versus staying on the community ’train’

Bruce also shares his approach to lifelong learning, why foundational skills compound, and how the Postgres community keeps engineers at the forefront - sustaining momentum across decades.

Show Links

Bruce generously shared links to all the presentations (with direct references to the discussed slides) and blog articles mentioned in the episode. You’ll find them below:

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