From dreaming of driving a bus to leading database engineering at Microsoft. In Episode 29 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, Shireesh Thota traces his path to becoming CVP of Azure databases—rooted in a love of math, early BASIC programming, and a certainty that he’d become an engineer. We dig into the shift from engineer to manager (if only people came with documentation); why it’s so important for Microsoft to contribute to the PostgreSQL open source project—not just consume it; and whether Shireesh has a favorite database (hint: it better be Postgres.)

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Blog post excerpt: Why we have a Postgres open source contributor team at Microsoft
• Podcast episode: Leading engineering for Postgres on Azure with Affan Dar
• VS Code Marketplace: New VS Code extension for PostgreSQL
• POSETTE 2025 talk: Introducing Microsoft’s VS Code extension for Postgres by Matt McFarland
• LinkedIn post: PGConf.dev 2025 talk on “The trouble with extensions” by Marco Slot
• Podcast episode: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with David Rowley
• Book: Who Moved My Cheese
• Cal invite: LIVE recording of Ep30 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed Aug 6, 2025

What drives someone to publish 600+ issues of a Postgres newsletter for over a decade? In Episode 28 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, Peter Cooper—creator of Postgres Weekly—shares how his days of rustic programming and QBASIC fanzines on Usenet led to a newsletter empire that now reaches nearly half a million developers each week. We dig into the BBC's "big tent" editorial influence, an accidental business model that just worked, and the perils of "temporary" hacks. Plus: spam filters, a Photoshop addiction, and one very cheesy story (dairy-free).

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Newsletter: Postgres Weekly
• Cooperpress: List of newsletters
• Newsletter: Latest issue of Postgres Weekly on Jun 19, 2025
• Newsletter: Postgres Weekly issue with horrible graphic
• Newsletter: Very first issue of Postgres Weekly on Mar 13, 2013
• Newsletter: Ruby Weekly, the first Cooperpress newsletter
• Book: Beginning Ruby Third Edition, by Peter Cooper
• Podcast episode: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with David Rowley
• Feed reader: Feedbin
• GitHub repo: feedbin/feedbin
• Feed reader: Feeder
• Email testing software: Litmus
• GitHub repo: MGML markup language for email
• Paper: The Design of Postgres
• GitHub repo: PGRX for building Postgres extensions in Rust
• Podcast news: Podnews.net for daily briefings about podcasts
• Wikipedia page: BBC Micro
• Wikipedia page: ZX Spectrum
• Cal invite: LIVE recording of Ep29 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed Jul 9, 2025

How does a trek to K2 base camp in the Himalayas spark the idea for a database company? In Episode 27 of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, guest Peter Farkas—CEO and co-founder of FerretDB—shares the origin story of this open source MongoDB alternative. (Spoiler: “Ferret” wasn’t the original name). We dig into why Postgres was the obvious choice, what “true open source” means to Peter, and how FerretDB is now powered by the open source DocumentDB extension from Microsoft. Plus, why Hungarian Trappist cheese might deserve a footnote in database history.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• GitHub: FerretDB/FerretDB repo
• Blog: FerretDB 2.0 GA: Open Source MongoDB alternative, ready for production
• ACM SIGMOD: The Design of Postgres, published 15 June 1986
• Postgres Weekly: Issue 591 featuring FerretDB
• GitHub: Microsoft/DocumentDB open source repo
• Conference talk: From MongoDB to Postgres: Building an Open Standard for Document Databases at POSETTE 2025
• OSI Blog: The SSL is Not an Open Source License
• RedMonk Blog: OSS: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, by Stephen O’Grady
• Talking Postgres Ep18: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with David Rowley
• OpenDocDB: initiative to define an open standard
• Wikipedia: K2 (yes, the mountain)
• Go Blog: The Go Gopher
• xkcd: webcomic 927 on Standards
• Wikipedia: Trappista cheese
• Cal invite: LIVE recording of Ep28 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed Jun 18, 2025

When I found out that Django developer and Python Software Foundation chair Dawn Wages has a chapter in her upcoming Domain-Driven Django book called “Just Use Postgres”, I knew we had to get her on the show. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, Dawn breaks down why so many Python and Django developers have such an affinity for Postgres. And we dive into the Djangonaut Space mentoring program (where contributors launch), learn why “free as in puppies” beats “free as in cake” for open source vibes, and dig into why Python is the second-best language for everything.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Project page: psycopg
• Documentation: Psycopg 3 – PostgreSQL database adapter for Python
• Project page: PostgreSQL open source project
• Git repo: code for PostgreSQL.org website
• Conference: PyCon US 2025, happening May 14-22 in Pittsburgh
• Conference: PGConf.dev 2025 Schedule, happening May 13-16 in Montreal Canada
• Conference: Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day 2025 (P2D2) Schedule, which took place Jan 28-29
• Wikipedia page: Model-view-controller software design pattern
• Book: Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0, affectionately called “the four heads book”
• Podcast episode: Working in Public with Simon Willison & Marco Slot
• Blog: Simon Willison’s TILs, aka Things I’ve learned
• Simon Willison’s Weblog: Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code
• Simon Willison’s Weblog: How I make annotated presentations
• Survey: Python Developers Survey 2023 Results
• Python Docs: What’s new in Python 3.14
• Mentorship program: Djangonaut Space
• Mentorship program: Media & Talks about Djangonaut Space
• Podcast episode: Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas
• Slides: PGConf EU 2024 talk by Claire Giordano about Contributions to Postgres, including maps showing how global the Postgres project is
• Video of POSETTE 2024 talk by Paolo Melchiorre: Semantic search with Django, PostgreSQL, & pgvector
• Video of Citus Con 2023 talk: Maps with Django (and PostGIS), by Paolo Melchiorre
• Video of Citus Con 2022 talk: Django with PostgreSQL superpowers, by Paolo Melchiorre
• Conference: DjangoCon Africa 2025, happening August 11-15 in Tanzania
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep26 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed Apr 02, 2025 with guest Bruce Momjian, to talk about Open Source Leadership

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