Michael and Nikolay are joined by three special guests for episode 100 who have all scaled Postgres to significant scale — Arka Ganguli from Notion, Sammy Steele from Figma, and Derk van Veen from Adyen. They cover how their setup has evolved, what their plans are for the future, and get into the weeds of some fun and interesting challenges along the way!

Links to some of the things discussed: 

• Arka Ganguli from Notion https://postgres.fm/people/arka-ganguli
• Sammy Steele from Figma https://postgres.fm/people/sammy-steele
• Derk van Veen from Adyen https://postgres.fm/people/derk-van-veen
• Thank you to yerrysherry on Reddit for the idea! https://www.reddit.com/r/PostgreSQL/comments/1cn8ajh/what_should_we_do_for_episode_100_of_postgres_fm
• Lessons learned from sharding Postgres at Notion (October 2021) https://www.notion.so/blog/sharding-postgres-at-notion
• Adding Postgres capacity (again) with zero downtime (July 2023) https://www.notion.so/blog/the-great-re-shard
• How Figma’s databases team lived to tell the scale (March 2024) https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-databases-team-lived-to-tell-the-scale
• Updating a 50 terabyte PostgreSQL database (March 2018) https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/updating-a-50-terabyte-postgresql-database
• Part 1: Introduction to Table Partitioning (July 2023) https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/introduction-to-table-partioning
• Part 2: Partitioning at Adyen (October 2023) https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/partitioning-at-adyen
• Part 3: Maintenance Under Pressure (January 2024) https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/maintenance-under-pressure
• Fighting PostgreSQL write amplification with HOT updates (May 2022) https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/postgresql-hot-updates
• Tracking HOT updates and tuning FillFactor (October 2022) https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/postgresql-hot-updates-part2
• Partitioning your Postgres tables for 20X better performance (upcoming talk by Derk at Posette) https://www.citusdata.com/posette/speakers/derk-van-veen
• Figma, including Sammy’s team, is hiring https://www.figma.com/careers 
• Notion’s engineering team is hiring https://www.notion.so/careers
• Adyen’s engineering team is hiring https://careers.adyen.com

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

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Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With special thanks to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork