Heikki Linnakangas, co-founder of Neon and a PostgreSQL expert since 2003, shares insights from his extensive journey in the Postgres community. He discusses the evolution of Postgres governance and the importance of community contributions. The conversation dives into the architecture of Neon, emphasizing serverless databases and latency improvements. Heikki also explores the exciting future of multi-threaded Postgres, addressing its challenges and potential impact on cloud services. Tune in for a wealth of technological insights and personal anecdotes!
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question_answer ANECDOTE
Heikki's Postgres Start Story
Heikki started hacking Postgres while on paternity leave with his second child, using the time to dive into Postgres source code.
His first major patch was for two-phase commit, a feature not highly used but important to maintain.
insights INSIGHT
Postgres Governance by Consensus
Postgres governance is decentralized and built on consensus among a self-selecting group of trusted committers.
Decision making lacks formal voting but is reinforced by long-term relationships and shared vision.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Sustaining Postgres Contribution
Attracting new contributors to Postgres is crucial to maintaining a sustainable community.
Despite flat mailing list activity, the community balances veteran and new participants effectively.
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In this episode of Database School, I talk with Heikki Linnakangas, co-founder of Neon and longtime PostgreSQL hacker, to talk about 20+ years in the Postgres community, the architecture behind Neon, and the future of multi-threaded Postgres. From paternity leave patches to branching production databases, we cover a lot of ground in this deep-dive conversation. Links: Let's make postgres multi-threaded: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/31cc6df9-53fe-3cd9-af5b-ac0d801163f4%40iki.fi Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36284487 Follow Heikki: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heikki-linnakangas-6b58bb203/ Website: https://neon.tech Follow Aaron: Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more. 00:00 - Introduction and Heikki's background 01:19 - How Heikki got into Postgres 03:17 - First major patch: two-phase commit 04:00 - Governance and decision-making in Postgres 07:00 - Committer consensus and decentralization 09:25 - Attracting new contributors 11:25 - Founding Neon with Nikita Shamgunov 13:01 - Why separation of compute and storage matters 15:00 - Write-ahead log and architectural insights 17:03 - Early days of building Neon 20:00 - Building the control plane and user-facing systems 21:28 - What "serverless Postgres" really means 23:39 - Reducing cold start time from 5s to 700ms 25:05 - Storage architecture and page servers 27:31 - Who uses sleepable databases 28:44 - Multi-tenancy and schema management 31:01 - Role in low-code/AI app generation 33:04 - Branching, time travel, and read replicas 36:56 - Real-time point-in-time query recovery 38:47 - Large customers and scaling in Neon 41:04 - Heikki’s favorite Neon feature: time travel 41:49 - Making Postgres multi-threaded 45:29 - Why it matters for connection scaling 50:50 - The next five years for Postgres and Neon 52:57 - Final thoughts and where to find Heikki
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