The future is Postgres (Interview)
Adam Stacoviak sits down with Craig Kerstiens to discuss why Postgres continues to dominate the database landscape through its reliable core and powerful extension ecosystem. They explore how pg_lake integrates DuckDB and Apache Iceberg into Postgres to bridge transactional and analytical workloads, examine major upcoming features in Postgres 19 like concurrent table repacking and query plan pinning, and reflect on the operational pressures placed on the ~50 Postgres committers by AI-generated contributions.
- Fewer than 100 people contribute directly to core Postgres development, and closer to 50 hold an actual commit bit. Read →
- Craig Kerstiens warns that the ratio of application developers to database specialists has escalated from 10:1 twenty years ago to 100:1 today, and is approaching 1,000:1. Read →
- Craig Kerstiens and engineers from Crunchy Data and Snowflake open-sourced pg_lake in November, bundling roughly 12 separate extensions into a single release. Read →
- Craig Kerstiens calls Postgres 19 the most important release in ten years, comparing its technical weight to the arrival of JSONB in 2014. Read →
- Postgres functions as an application runtime where extensions like PostGIS, pgvector, and pg_lake replace standalone infrastructure components. Read →