Changelog Interviews Bringing Vitess to Postgres
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Jul 23, 2025 Sugu Sougoumarane is the creator of Vitess and now leads Multigress at Supabase. He shares his motivation for leaving a three-year sabbatical to integrate Vitess with Postgres at a pivotal time in tech. Sugu discusses the technical hurdles of this integration, such as sharding and query processing, while reflecting on the evolving landscape of database technology. He emphasizes the need for innovative solutions in database management and the importance of maintaining native user experiences as industry demands shift.
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Sugu's Sabbatical Story
- Sugu took a three-year sabbatical for self-reinvention and to recover from burnout after 12 years with Vitess.
- He found himself missing technical work and gradually returned to the field.
Vitess Origins and Evolution
- Vitess was born out of YouTube's frequent database outages with an intelligent proxy solution.
- It evolved from connection pooling to a fully sharded distributed database over years.
Vitess Sharding Breakthrough
- Sharding is an old concept but rarely developed into practical, scalable production systems.
- Vitess introduced a new approach by internally computing keyspace IDs and analyzing queries to enable transparent sharding without application changes.