20 years of hacking Postgres with Heikki Linnakangas (cofounder of Neon)

Database School

Innhold levert av Aaron Francis and Try Hard Studios. Alt podcastinnhold, inkludert episoder, grafikk og podcastbeskrivelser, lastes opp og leveres direkte av Aaron Francis and Try Hard Studios eller deres podcastplattformpartner. Hvis du tror at noen bruker det opphavsrettsbeskyttede verket ditt uten din tillatelse, kan du følge prosessen skissert her https://no.player.fm/legal.

8M ago 2:00:11

MP3•Episoder hjem

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.

Database school on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI72dgeNJtzqElnNB6sQoAn2R-F3Vqm15
Database school audio only: https://databaseschool.transistor.fm

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

29 episoder

#Tech #Aaron Francis #Try Hard Studios #Podcasting Education #Database #Programming #Technology #Software Development