It’s rare for developers to genuinely love their database, so why does Postgres earn that kind of loyalty? In Episode 38 of Talking Postgres, Gwen Shapira, co‑founder of Nile, joins Claire to trace her path from operating Oracle at scale, through a long NoSQL chapter, to co‑founding a Postgres company that wasn’t originally meant to be one—after discovering how much Postgres quietly gets right. Gwen shares how she spun up on Postgres after years with other databases (shout-out to the Happiness Hints and a strong sense of curiosity), and why Postgres has made her appreciate Codd. We also touch on blogging as a career catalyst, the upcoming PGConf.dev conference (where a lot of PG20 work gets discussed, and where we’ll celebrate 30 years of Postgres)—and the #1 rule of consulting: it’s always the consultant’s fault.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep15: My Journey to Explaining Explain with Michael Christofides
• Talking Postgres Ep24: Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas
• Talking Postgres Ep30: AI for data engineers with Simon Willison

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Gwen’s company: Nile
• Ardent Performance Computing blog: PostgreSQL Happiness Hints
• Book: Just Use Postgres! by Denis Magda
• GitHub repo: HypoPG
• Wikipedia page: Codd’s 12 rules
• Blog post: Transaction Isolation in Postgres, by Gwen Shapira
• Podcast: Postgres.FM
• Discord server: PostgreSQL Hacking

Upcoming conferences & talks mentioned:

• Conference: PGConf.dev 2026 on May 19-22 in Vancouver Canada
• Conference Schedule: PGConf.dev 2026 schedule
• CFP deadline: PGConf.dev Community Discussion Sessions deadline on 14 Apr 2026
• Conference: PGConf EU 2026 in Valencia Spain
• LinkedIn post: PGConf.dev 2026 conference t-shirt, celebrating 30 years of Postgres
• POSETTE 2026 talk: The Rise of PostgreSQL as the Everything Database, by Varun Dhawan
• PGConf.dev 2026 Panel: Real-Time Patch Idea Evaluation
• PGConf.dev 2026 Roundtable: Unexpected Successes & Epic Failures by PostgreSQL committers
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep39 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed May 06, 2026

Why does SQL feel so approachable to some developers, and why do some of them end up spending their careers in the data layer? In Episode 37 of Talking Postgres, Charles Feddersen, who leads product for Postgres at Microsoft, joins Claire to talk about building Postgres services on Azure. We explore his path from classic ASP apps on Microsoft Access to distributed Postgres with Citus, the moment he installed pgAdmin and got pulled deeper into Postgres, and what it takes to build for the many different ways people rely on Postgres today—from Flexible Server and Azure HorizonDB to developer tooling—and why it’s important to support the upstream Postgres open source project.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Ep 22: Leading engineering for Postgres on Azure with Affan Dar: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/leading-engineering-for-postgres-on-azure-with-affan-dar
• Ep29: How I got started leading database teams with Shireesh Thota https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/how-i-got-started-leading-database-teams-with-shireesh-thota

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Video of CMUDB talk: HorizonDB: Co‑Designing PostgreSQL and Azure for Cloud‑Native OLTP, by Adam Prout
• Video of talk: Azure HorizonDB: Deep Dive into a New Enterprise-Scale PostgreSQL, by Adam Prout & Denzil Ribeiro
• Talk at SCALE 23x: Did VS Code Quietly Become a Go-To Postgres Tool?, by Phil Vacca
• Visual Studio Code Marketplace: VS Code extension for PostgreSQL
• Docs: Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server
• GitHub repo: Citus open source
• Postgres extension: PostGIS
• Conference: PGConf India 2026

Upcoming conferences & talks mentioned:

• Conference: PGConf.dev 2026 in Vancouver Canada
• Conference: Microsoft Build 2026
• Keynote at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026: Driving Postgres forward at Microsoft
• POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026: Schedule
• Conference: Postgres Summit US 2026 (formerly PGConf NYC)
• Conference: PGConf EU 2026 in Valencia
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep38 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed Apr 08, 2026

Why would anyone willingly spend weeks chasing a slow query, knowing they might hit dead ends along the way? In Episode 36 of Talking Postgres, Tomas Vondra—Postgres committer and long‑time performance contributor—joins Claire to explain why hacking on Postgres performance is not just hard, but also fun. We dig into the process of investigating why queries are slow, how iteration and “wrong turns” are part of performance work, and why Tomas prefers meaningful performance puzzles over toy problems. Along the way, we talk about using benchmarks to build an understanding of a problem. Tomas also shares how even small changes in code can have outsized impact when that code is used a lot, and how the mathematics embedded in the Postgres query planner/executor makes the work especially rewarding.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep31: What went wrong (& what went right) with AIO with Andres Freund
• Talking Postgres Ep24: Why mentor Postgres developers with Robert Haas

Links mentioned in this episode:

• PGConf.dev 2026: Schedule
• GitHub repo: PostgreSQL Monthly Hacking Workshop, organized by Robert Haas
• Nordic PGDay 2026: Tomas talk on approximating percentiles
• Video of POSETTE 2025 talk: Performance Archaeology – 20 years of improvements
• Video of PGConf EU 2025 talk: Fast-path locking improvements in PG18
• Conference: Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day
• Discord: PostgreSQL Hacking Discord
• GitHub repo: tvondra/tdigest
• Brendan Gregg’s site: perf Linux profiler examples
• Docs: pgbench for running benchmarks on PostgreSQL
• Blog: Tomas Vondra blog
• Postgres Patch Ideas: List on Tomas Vondra blog
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep37 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed Mar 18, 2026