Nobody works on an open-source project forever—eventually, people move on. So of course today's Postgres contributors want to see more developers join the project, pick up the torch, and continue to make Postgres amazing. Hence the importance of mentorship. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, PostgreSQL major contributor and committer Robert Haas shares how he learned the ropes in Postgres by channeling “what would Tom Lane do” during patch reviews; why he launched the new PostgreSQL Hackers Mentoring program; and the intellectually stimulating care and feeding it takes to make Postgres thrive.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Podcast episode: Becoming a Postgres committer with Melanie Plageman
• Slide: PGConf EU 2024 talk by Claire Giordano about Contributions to Postgres, including new mentoring program
• Blog post: New Mentoring Program for Code Contributors in Postgres, by Robert Haas
• Blog post: Postgres Mentoring Program Updates, by Robert Haas
• Discord invite for PostgreSQL Hacker Mentoring server: https://discord.gg/bx2G9KWyrY
• Bio: Margo Seltzer, the PGConf.dev 2024 keynote speaker
• Video: PGConf.dev 2024 panel discussion about Making PostgreSQL Hacking More Inclusive with Amit Langote, Masahiko Sawada, Melanie Plageman, & Robert Haas
• Mailing list: PostgreSQL Hackers
• Upcoming Conference: PGConf.dev 2025, the annual PostgreSQL Development Conference happening in Montreal Canada on May 13-16, 2025
• Blog: Postgres committer Tomas Vondra’s Blog - Look for [PATCH IDEA]
• Video of Talk: CMUDB Database talk about PostgreSQL Optimizer Methodology, by Robert Haas
• Podcast episode: How I got started as a developer & in Postgres with David Rowley
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep25 of Talking Postgres podcast to happen on Wed Mar 12, 2025 with guest Dawn Wages of the Python developer community

March 5th 2005 at 3 PM in Copenhagen. That’s the exact time and place Daniel Gustafsson’s career took an unexpected turn, pivoting from operating systems to databases. At LinuxForum that day, Daniel had planned to meet up with the FreeBSD community, but a chance session about Postgres by Bruce Momjian completely blew his mind. By the time Daniel was on the train back to Malmö, he was already compiling Postgres. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, Postgres major contributor and committer Daniel Gustafsson of Microsoft walks us through how he got his start as a developer and in Postgres—starting with his earliest computing memories of a hulking steel box in his family’s living room in Sweden. Also part of Daniel’s story: guitar tuning software. And curl!

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Wikipedia: ABC 80
• Wikipedia: mSQL
• Wikipedia: PCBoard BBS (bulletin board system) application
• Conference back in 2010: CHAR(10) – Clustering, HA and Replication Conference
• Wikipedia: IRIX operating system
• Internet Archive Wayback Machine link: LinuxForum Conference Agenda from March 5, 2005 with Bruce Momjian’s 3:00pm talk about Postgres
• Podcast: Solving every data problem in SQL with Dimitri Fontaine & Vik Fearing
• Conference: Nordic PGDay 2025 to happen Mar 18th in Copenhagen
• Conference: All Things Open 2025 to happen Oct 12-14 in Raleigh NC
• Conference: PGConf.dev 2025 to happen May 13-16 in Montreal, Canada
• CFP: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 CFP open until Feb 9 2025 (it’s a virtual event)
• Slides from PGConfEU 2024 Talk: What’s in a Postgres major release? An analysis of contributions in v17 timeframe
• Video of PGConf EU 2024 Talk: Analysis of contributions in the v17 timeframe, by Claire Giordano
• Book recommendation: The Dragon Book, a.k.a. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
• Book recommendation: The Purple Book (or, Wizard Book), a.k.a. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)
• Book recommendation: The Practice of Programming by Kernighan & Pike
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep24 of Talking Postgres podcast to happen on Wed Feb 05, 2025 with guest Robert Haas

What’s it like to lead Postgres engineering at a cloud giant like Microsoft Azure? In this episode of Talking Postgres, host Claire Giordano chats with Affan Dar, VP of Engineering for Postgres at Microsoft. Affan’s team is behind the Azure Database for PostgreSQL managed service and also contributes extensively to the upstream Postgres open-source project. Affan walks us through his career journey—from his first job as an embedded systems engineer, to navigating the shift between engineering and management, to leading one of the largest Postgres engineering teams in the world. He shares the strategy behind Microsoft’s investments into Postgres, explores how massive cloud fleets are influencing the future of Postgres, and shares what keeps him up at night.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Docs: Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server
• GitHub repo for Durable Task Framework, the first open source project Affan worked on
• GitHub repo for pgvector open source extension to Postgres
• Docs: Elastic cluster feature in Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server, based on Citus
• GitHub repo for Citus open source
• Blog post: Postgres horizontal scaling with elastic clusters on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, by Adam Wølk
• GitHub repo for DiskANN open source
• Docs: How to enable and use the DiskANN index for Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server
• Blog post: Think of language models like ChatGPT as a “calculator for words” by Simon Willison
• Blog post: What’s new with Postgres at Microsoft (updated 2x/year typically)
• Video of Talk at Microsoft Ignite: Improving accuracy of GenAI apps with Azure Database for PostgreSQL by Maxim Lukiyanov (Microsoft), Jay Yang (UBS), & Orhun Oezbek (UBS)
• CFP: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 CFP open until Feb 9 2025
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep23 of Talking Postgres podcast to happen on Wed Jan 15, 2025 with guest Daniel Gustafsson