Six years, a prototype, and a brief multi-layered descent into “wronger and wronger” design—what does it take to land a major architectural change in Postgres? In Episode 31 of Talking Postgres, Andres Freund—major contributor, Postgres committer, and lead of the Asynchronous I/O project—shares the wins, the missteps, and why he thinks AIO definitely took too long. We dig into io_uring in Linux, direct I/O, streaming reads, technical leadership, and exactly when is the right time to stop working on a prototype. If you’ve ever wondered how big architectural changes happen, or why they sometimes take years, this episode is for you.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Talking Postgres podcast: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas
• Release Notes: PostgreSQL 18 release notes
• News: PostgreSQL RC 1 Released on Sep 04 2025
• Wikipedia page: io_uring
• PostgreSQL: Join the PostgreSQL Hacking Discord
• Video of talk: What went wrong with AIO by Andres Freund at PGConfdev 2025
• Commit: Add core asynchronous I/O infrastructure to PostgreSQL
• Wiki page: AIO project in PostgreSQL with state, sub-projects, and work still to be done
• Upcoming Talk: AIO in PG 18 and Beyond at PGConf NYC on 30 Sep 2025
• Upcoming Talk: AIO in PG 18 and Beyond at PGConf EU on 23 Oct 2025
• Wikipedia page: XZ Utils backdoor discovery by Andres Freund
• Cal invite: LIVE recording of Ep32 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed Oct 8, 2025

Why do Postgres developers, contributors, and users do what they do? In each episode of Talking Postgres, Claire Giordano talks to people from across the Postgres ecosystem—how they got started, what they’ve learned, and what they’re still figuring out. This 3-minute trailer offers a fast-paced glimpse into the fun, surprising, and deeply human stories behind Postgres, including failures, wins, obstacles—and all the messy parts in between. New episodes monthly. Always on Fridays. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Episodes from Talking Postgres with guests featured in the trailer (in order of appearance):

Episode 01: Working in public on open source with Simon Willison and Marco Slot

Episode 18: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with David Rowley

Episode 20: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with Tom Lane

Episode 07: Why people care about PostGIS and Postgres with Paul Ramsey & Regina Obe

Episode 29: How I got started leading database teams with Shireesh Thota

Episode 25: Why Python developers just use Postgres with Dawn Wages

Episode 19: Becoming a Postgres committer with Melanie Plageman

Episode 24: Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas

Episode 04: How I got started as a dev (& in Postgres) w/Melanie Plageman & Thomas Munro

It’s always a good day if you see a pelican. In Episode 30 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, open source developer Simon Willison—creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django—joins to explore how AI is useful for data engineers today. We move past the hype and boosterism to dig into example after example: structured data extraction, alt text and accessibility, safety and security (aka the fiddly bits), and why Postgres’s fine-grained permissions are such a good fit for AI-powered workflows. Also: Pulitzer-worthy data tooling, the science fiction of the 10X engineer, agents, MCP, RAG, the multitude of models, and why Simon spends so many waking hours on the jagged frontier of AI.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Blog: Simon Willison’s Weblog
• Blog: Simon’s Willison’s TIL - Things I’ve Learned
• Podcast episode: Working in public on open source with Simon Willison and Marco Slot
• Project page: Django Web Framework
• Project page: Datasette, for finding stories in data
• GitHub repo: llm CLI tool and Python library
• Demo: Language models on the command-line w/ Simon Willison
• Blog post: OpenAI’s new open weight (Apache 2) models are really good, by Simon Willison
• Podcast episode: Accessibility and Gen AI podcast with guest Simon Willison
• Blog post: New dashboard: alt text for all my images, by Simon Willison
• Keynote talk: Big Opportunities in Small Data, by Simon Willison at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023
• Blog post: How OpenElections Uses LLMs, by Derek Willis
• Blog posts tagged with pelican-riding-a-bicycle on Simon Willison’s Weblog
• Blog post: No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive, via Colton Voege, featured on Simon’s weblog
• GitHub repo: pgvector extension to Postgres
• Cal invite: LIVE recording of Ep31 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed Sep 17, 2025