Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

Drop the fear, not the tables. Chelsea Dole and Floor Drees join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the app developer perspective on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. If you’re an app developer, you’re probably already using Postgres. Now what? What do you need to know? Are databases your best friend or your worst enemy? They talk about the steps to becoming more Postgres-savvy. Should you go depth-first or breadth-first in order to learn more about the underlying database? What are Postgres extensions and how do you go about adopting them? Find out more about the strength of what Floor calls “boring technology.” Finally, both guests tell stories of their non-traditional entries into Postgres that led to their deep work with databases today.*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.comLinks mentioned in this episode: Fintech startup where Chelsea works, Brex: https://www.brex.com/  Open source data platform where Floor works, Aiven: https://aiven.io/  “Mission-Critical PostgreSQL Databases on Kubernetes" by Karen Jex at KubeCon Europe 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NBQ9JmOMko The Imposters Handbook by Rob Conery: https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/ Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781491903063/  Devopsdays Amsterdam: https://devopsdays.org/events/2023-amsterdam/welcome/  Building Community in Open Source with Floor Drees on the Last Week in AWS podcast: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/building-community-in-open-source-with-floor-drees/ pg_stat_statements: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgstatstatements.html PostGIS: https://postgis.net/  “Postgres tips for optimizing Django & Python performance, from my PyCon workshop” by Louise Grandjonc: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2020/05/20/postgres-tips-for-django-and-python/  Video of Louise’s PyCon talk, Optimize Django & Python performance with Postgres superpowers: https://youtu.be/dyBLGjCQJHsGrafana: https://grafana.com/pganalyze: https://pganalyze.com/ auto_explain: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/auto-explain.html EXPLAIN ANALYZE in PostgreSQL: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-explain.html  psql: https://www.postgresguide.com/utilities/psql/ Path To Citus Con Episode 05: My favorite ways to learn more about PostgreSQL with Grant Fritchey and Ryan Booz: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/my-favorite-ways-to-learn-more-about-postgresql-with-grant-fritchey-and-ryan-booz Coffee Meets Bagel (dating app): https://coffeemeetsbagel.com/ 

Everyone learns differently. Grant Fritchey and Ryan Booz, database advocates at Redgate focusing on PostgreSQL, talk with Path To Citus Con* co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the learning resources available to developers and users in all the corners of the PostgreSQL world. What drives you to learn: need or curiosity? What can podcasts teach us while we bike to work? Are conference talks good for growing skills, or are they better for networking? What about books? And do older books still have much to offer? It turns out, most people need much more than one approach to build their knowledge. *[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.comSome of the (many) links shared in the order they were mentioned: Talk: Ryan’s talk Point-in-time query tuning and observability with pg_stat_statements at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2022Blog: Learning PostgreSQL with Grant, a series for SQL Server devs learning about Postgres  Podcast: postgres.fm, a weekly podcast about all things Postgres Podcast: Path To Citus Con Episode 01: Working in public on open sourceBlog aggregator: Planet PostgreSQL Email Newsletters: Cooperpress, including the Postgres Weekly email Podcast: Scaling PostgreSQL with Creston Jamison User Groups: PostgreSQL Community User Groups Videos: pganalyze "5 minutes of Postgres," by Lukas Fittl Book: The Art of PostgreSQL, by Dimitri Fontaine Book: PostgreSQL Query Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Building Efficient Queries, by Henrietta Dombrovskaya Book: SQL Performance Explained, by Markus Winand Blog: Modern SQL, by Markus WinandBlog: Use The Index, Luke, by Markus WinandBook: Database Administration, by Craig Mullins Book: A Curious Moon, by Rob Conery Book: The Little SQL Book, by Rob Conery, “Learn SQL While Watching Football This Weekend - Free!” Event: PGDay Chicago Blog: Redgate – Simple Talk Videos: CMU Database Group’s Talks on YouTube: Quarantine (2020), First Dose (2021), Second Dose (2021),  Booster (2022) Crunchy Data’s Postgres Playground Blog: CYBERTEC Blog: Citus Open Source Blog Talk: How To Make Your Postgres Blog Posts Reach A Ton More People, by Claire GiordanoConference: PGCon 2023, super useful to watch recorded talks after the fact Conference: PGConf.EU, 2022, good example of an in-person event with lots of opportunities for learning Conference: Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023 Conference: PGConf NYC 2023 Blog Series: PGSQL Phriday, created by Ryan BoozBlog Series: PostgreSQL Person of the Week, by Andreas Scherbaum Blog: Robert Haas' blogBlog: select * from depesz;Book: PostgreSQL 14 internals, by Egor Rogov

In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, Melanie Plageman, a PostgreSQL hacker working at Microsoft, and Thomas Munro, PostgreSQL developer and committer also at Microsoft talk with co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia. They talk through all the different ways they got started as developers. Does making your first patch to Postgres get you hooked for a lifetime? Do you have to be a tinkerer to be a good software engineer? What is the “toothbrush test”—and how do you make your avocation be your vocation? We hear stories about dropping out of school or dropped out of career fields before they found their true passions in development and Postgres. *[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.comSome of the links mentioned in the order they were said: Parallelism in PostgreSQL 15: Thomas’ Citus Con talk Additional IO Observability in Postgres with pg_stat_io: Melanie’s Citus Con talk Visualizing PostgreSQL I/O Performance for Development: Melanie’s talk at PGCon 2023Add pg_stat_io view, providing more detailed IO statistics, committed by Melanie Plageman in PG 16  Neil deGrasse Tyson’s podcast StarTalk From Nand to Tetris by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken Sinclair ZX81 All Things Open conference PostgreSQL BuildFarm Queues in PostgreSQL: Thomas’ 2022 talk 

Álvaro Herrera, and Boriss Mejías, both longtime members of the Postgres developer community, explore the value of giving conference talks—as well as the work involved, the time it takes, and the many different types of conference talks, including presentations about about failure and things that have gone wrong.  In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, Claire and Pino guide the conversation on questions like: Should you add humor to your talks? How does your personality—introvert or extrovert—affect your conference presentations? Is it OK to give the same conference talk at different events?  *[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.comSome of the links mentioned in the order they appeared: Postgres Storytelling: Support in the Darkest Hour: Boriss’ Citus Con talk A Curious Moon book by Rob Conery Tomas Vondra's talks on YouTubepgDay Paris 2022FOSDEM PostgreSQL devroomFOSDEM PGDAY 2023Nordic PGDay 2022PGConf.EU 2022LFMF: How a CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY led to a 6 hour downtime by Gunnar "Nick" Bluth

Join Claire and Pino as they talk with Citus and Postgres open source team members to explore how to get Postgres ready for the next 100 million users. What will future Postgres users look like? How will the Postgres development process evolve with more users? What are the common challenges faced by Postgres users?  Citus open source team members Abdullah Ustuner and Burak Yucesoy are joined by Postgres open source teammates Melanie Plageman and Samay Sharma—and co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia—in this episode of Path To Citus Con*. Listen to the deep dive on what it means to scale the code and the community far beyond the Postgres world of today. *[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.comSome links from the show in the order they were mentioned: Additional IO Observability in Postgres: Melanie's talk at Citus Con 2023Optimizing Postgres for write heavy workloads ft. Checkpoint and WAL configs: Samay's talk at Citus Con 2023The Design of Postgres, by Michael Stonebraker and Lawrence A. Rowe, 1986 HyperLogLog PostGIS timescale/pgspot

Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django. Marco Slot is the lead architect for the Citus database extension to Postgres. In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, Simon and Marco talk about working in public on open source. Simon shares many of his learnings in public—with weeknotes, tweets, blogs, and “today I learned” (TIL) posts. Marco has been developing Citus in public since it was first open sourced in 2016.  Hosted by Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia from the Postgres team at Microsoft, listen to find out how working in public can help “future you”—and how there are selfish benefits to be had by working in open source. (Also: how to stay positive in the face of critics?)  *[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.comSome of the topics covered in the order they were mentioned:Simon's weeknotesSimon's TIL postsDatasette pluginsCitus open source GitHub repoFibonacci Spirals and Ways to Contribute to Postgres—Beyond Code - Claire's talk in 2022Big Opportunities in Small Data - Simon's keynote at Citus Con: An Event for PostgresThe Distributed PostgreSQL Problem and How Citus Solves It - Marco’s keynote at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres