20 years of hacking Postgres with Heikki Linnakangas (cofounder of Neon)
Database School6 Touko 2025

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

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

Jaksot(30)

A million transactions per second: building TigerBeetle with Joran Greef

A million transactions per second: building TigerBeetle with Joran Greef

In this episode, Aaron talks with Joran Greef, CEO and creator of TigerBeetle, the world’s first financial transactions database. Joran takes us on a deep dive of on how TigerBeetle brings double-entr...

23 Loka 20251h 28min

PlanetScale Postgres with CEO Sam Lambert

PlanetScale Postgres with CEO Sam Lambert

Sam Lambert, my former boss at PlanetScale, talks to me about PlanetScale moving from a MySQL company to now also having a Postgres offering. Sam shares why PlanetScale decided to move to Postgres, ho...

22 Syys 20251h 6min

The database for all your AI needs

The database for all your AI needs

Marcel Kornacker, the creator of Apache Impala and co-creator of Apache Parquet, joins me to talk about his latest project: Pixeltable, a multimodal AI database that combines structured and unstructur...

16 Syys 20251h

Sharding Postgres without extensions with PgDog founder, Lev Kokotov

Sharding Postgres without extensions with PgDog founder, Lev Kokotov

I chat with Lev Kokotov to talk about building PgDog, an open-source sharding solution for Postgres that sits outside the database. Lev shares the journey from creating PgCat to launching PgDog throug...

19 Elo 202548min

Rewriting SQLite from scratch (yes, really)

Rewriting SQLite from scratch (yes, really)

Want to learn more about SQLite?  Check out my course on SQLite: https://highperformancesqlite.com/?ref=yt  In this episode of Database School, I chat with Glauber Costa, CEO of Turso, about their aud...

8 Elo 20251h 17min

Vitess for Postgres, with the co-founder of PlanetScale

Vitess for Postgres, with the co-founder of PlanetScale

Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creator of Vitess and co-founder of PlanetScale, joins me to talk about his time scaling YouTube’s database infrastructure, building Vitess, and his latest project bringing shard...

1 Heinä 20251h 7min

PlanetScale Metal

PlanetScale Metal

In this episode, I chat with Richard Crowley from PlanetScale about their new offering: PlanetScale Metal.We dive deep into the performance and reliability trade-offs of EBS vs. locally attached NVMe ...

27 Kesä 202550min

From Prisma Founder to LiveStore: Building local-first apps with Johannes Schickling

From Prisma Founder to LiveStore: Building local-first apps with Johannes Schickling

Johannes Schickling, original founder of Prisma, joins me to talk about LiveStore, his ambitious local-first data layer designed to rethink how we build apps from the data layer up.We dive deep into e...

29 Touko 20251h 31min

Suosittua kategoriassa Koulutus

rss-murhan-anatomia
psykopodiaa-podcast
voi-hyvin-meditaatiot-2
adhd-podi
rss-narsisti
psykologia
rahapuhetta
kesken
rss-duodecim-lehti
rss-valo-minussa-2
rss-vapaudu-voimaasi
rss-liian-kuuma-peruna
rss-niinku-asia-on
aamukahvilla
rss-uskonto-on-tylsaa
rss-honest-talk-with-laurrenna
rss-luonnollinen-synnytys-podcast
rss-tietoinen-yhteys-podcast-2
rss-koira-haudattuna
rss-opeklubi