The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source Bringing Vitess to Postgres (Interview)
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Jul 23, 2025 Sugu Sougoumarane, creator of Vitess and co-founder of PlanetScale, discusses his return from sabbatical to bring Vitess to Postgres as the head of Multigres at Supabase. He shares insights on the challenges of adapting Vitess for Postgres, including query processing and sharding. The conversation covers the importance of maintaining database compatibility and the evolving landscape of tech, particularly in databases and AI. Sugu also emphasizes community engagement and the future of Postgres innovations.
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Sugu's Sabbatical and Reinvention
- Sugu took a three-year sabbatical to reinvent himself and recover from burnout after 12 years on Vitess.
- Gardening and voluntary work helped him reconnect with his human side before craving technical work again.
Vitess Evolution from Connection Pooler
- Vitess started as a smart connection pooler to solve YouTube's database scaling and availability problems.
- It evolved into a fully distributed sharded database solution by adding intelligent query parsing and routing.
Sharding Without Application Awareness
- The hardest part of building Vitess was making sharding transparent to applications without requiring them to know shard locations.
- Sugu developed new methods to analyze and route complex SQL queries across shards.