Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano – Details, episodes & analysis

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Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

Microsoft

Technology

Frequency: 1 episode/27d. Total Eps: 29

Talking Postgres is a podcast for developers who love Postgres. Guests join Claire Giordano each month to discuss the human side of PostgreSQL, databases, and open source. With amazing guests such as Boriss Mejías, Melanie Plageman, Tom Lane, Simon Willison, Robert Haas, and Andres Freund, Talking Postgres is guaranteed to get you thinking. Recorded live on Discord by the Postgres team at Microsoft, you can subscribe to our calendar to join us live on the parallel text chat (which is quite fun!): https://aka.ms/TalkingPostgres-cal

Recent rankings

Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.

Apple Podcasts

🇫🇷 France - technology
13/07/2025
#100
🇫🇷 France - technology
17/11/2024
#99

Spotify

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Shared links between episodes and podcasts

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https://hachyderm.io/@clairegiordano
18 shares
https://talkingpostgres.com/
17 shares
https://talkingpostgres.com
17 shares

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhqxwIAgz78HZhWyu3UyKrCWNk7VWjVpj
4 shares
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_smHyqgDTU&amp
3 shares
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZQun8Y4L2A
2 shares

https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector
5 shares
https://github.com/ankane
2 shares

RSS feed quality and score

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RSS feed quality

To improve

Score global : 58%

Publication history

Monthly episode publishing history over the past years.

Year

Latest published episodes

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Helping Rails developers learn Postgres with Andrew Atkinson

Episode 21

Friday, November 15, 2024 • Duration 01:34:26

Have you ever achieved something remarkable because someone planted an idea in your mind? In this episode of Talking Postgres, host Claire Giordano talks with Andrew Atkinson—a Rails developer and Postgres user whose journey to becoming a published author began with a simple seed of inspiration. Andrew’s story started with an internal presentation on how to tackle tricky scalability challenges in Rails, grew into a Postgres conference talk at PGConf NYC—and ultimately evolved into his book, High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails. Also in this episode: what does cheese have to do with Postgres? Is writing a good way to think? What’s the connection between Postgres and swimming to Antarctica? And which chapter of his book does Andrew love the most?

Links mentioned in this episode:

Book: High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails by Andrew Atkinson
E-book Discount: Use discount code TalkingPostgres to get 35% off discount of Andrew’s book
Blog post: Readers get their copies of High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails by Andrew Atkinson
Book: Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox
Talk Abstract: PGConf NYC 2021 talk by Andrew Atkinson
Slides: PGConf NYC 2021 talk on How We Made PG Fitter, Happier, More Productive by Andrew Atkinson
Video: POSETTE 2024 talk about SaaS on Rails on PostgreSQL by Andrew Atkinson
Ruby User Groups: List of upcoming Ruby user groups
Blog post: Writing is Thinking, an annotated twitter thread by Steve Sinofsky
Talking Postgres podcast Ep19: Becoming a Postgres committer with Melanie Plageman
Talking Postgres podcast Ep20: How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with David Rowley
CFP: Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day 2025 (P2D2) CFP open until Nov 23, 2024
CFP: FOSDEM PGDay 2025 CFP open until Nov 29, 2024
CFP: Nordic PGDay 2025 CFP open until Dec 31, 2024
CFP: pgDay Paris 2025 CFP open until Dec 31, 2024
CFP: PGConf.dev 2025 CFP open until Jan 01, 2025
CFP: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 CFP open until Feb 09, 2025
Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep22 of Talking Postgres podcast

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

Episode 20

Friday, October 11, 2024 • Duration 01:39:18

It was not Tom Lane’s plan to become a computer person. Tom’s plan was to be a pinball machine designer. And yet for the last 26 years Tom has been one of the most prolific engineering contributors to Postgres. In this episode of Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano, PostgreSQL luminary Tom Lane walks us through how he got his start as a developer and in Postgres—including his time working on desktop calculators at HP. And how he has code running on Mars (and most of us don’t.) During Tom’s PhD studies at Carnegie Mellon, nobody told him databases were so interesting! It wasn’t until Tom needed a database to store stock trading information that he first got to work with Postgres. And that’s when Tom’s 26-year-long (and counting) Postgres story began.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Wikipedia: Tom Lane (computer scientist)
Wikipedia: HP 9800 series
CMU CS Department Coke Machine history
Wikipedia: Honeywell 316
Wikipedia: Teletype Model 33
Wikipedia: Hydra (operating system)
Wikipedia: William Wulf
Wikipedia: Jon Bentley (computer scientist)
Wikipedia: Mary Shaw (computer scientist)
Wikipedia: Usenet

My Journey into Performance Benchmarking with Jelte Fennema-Nio & Marco Slot

Episode 11

Friday, January 12, 2024 • Duration 01:13:35

No one likes benchmarking. But it can be one of the highest impact things you do. Jelte Fennema-Nio and Marco Slot joined Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on this episode of Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss their journeys into performance benchmarking. And how it can change the course of your career. Do you need to find bottlenecks in your Postgres? Do you want to build skills with database benchmarks? There are many lovely benchmarking tools in the Postgres world: HammerDB, pgbench, YCSB, BenchBase, perf, & more. And in addition to running benchmarks themselves—asking the right questions, introspection, and profiling matter just as much.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode:

Podcast: Path To Citus Con Ep01: Working in public on open source with Simon Willison & Marco Slot: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/working-in-public-on-open-source
Streetlight effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
BenchBase: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/projects/benchbase/
HammerDB: https://www.hammerdb.com/
Slides: Intro to benchmarking with pgbench at PGConf NYC 2023 by Melanie Plageman: https://speakerdeck.com/melanieplageman/intro-to-benchmarking-with-pgbench

My Journey into Postgres Monitoring with Lukas Fittl & Rob Treat

Episode 10

Friday, December 8, 2023 • Duration 01:21:02

Do you monitor your Postgres error logs for gold? Lukas Fittl and Rob Treat join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss their respective journeys into Postgres monitoring. Have you ever asked yourself: “Why is my query so slow?” Or had to figure out which query is slowing things down? Or why your database server is at 90% CPU? There are so many ways to monitor Postgres: pganalyze, pgMustard, pgBadger, pgDash, your cloud provider’s Query Performance Insights, pg_stat_statements, pg_stat_io, & more. If you’re running Postgres on a managed service, what kinds of things do you need to monitor & optimize for (vs. what will your cloud service provider do)? There’s also a segue on monitoring vs. observability: what’s the difference?

Links mentioned in this episode:

OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/
pganalyze: https://pganalyze.com/
pgDash: https://pgdash.io/
pgMustard: https://www.pgmustard.com/
pg_stat_statements docs: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgstatstatements.html
pg_hint_plan: https://github.com/ossc-db/pg_hint_plan

Solving every data problem in SQL w/Dimitri Fontaine & Vik Fearing

Episode 9

Friday, November 3, 2023 • Duration 01:17:06

Is being lazy a good reason to learn SQL? Dimitri Fontaine and Vik Fearing join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss whether every data problem can be (or should be) solved in SQL. Have you tried to solve all the Advent of Code puzzles with SQL? Or written a book for application developers about The Art of PostgreSQL? Or tried to solve a murder mystery by running SQL queries? Regardless of whether you pronounce SQL as “sequel” or as “ess-cue-ell”, getting skilled at SQL is like going to the gym for exercise. It’s ideal to do it every day to build up your strength. Also, this episode includes an explanation of what a “declarative” language like SQL is—plus a fun segue into time zones.

Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:

Dimitri Fontaine’s blog: https://tapoueh.org/
Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com/
Dimitri’s book, The Art of PostgreSQL: https://theartofpostgresql.com/
Blog post about What’s new in SQL:2023: https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/04/sql-2023-is-finished-here-is-whats-new
PostgreSQL Exercises at pgexercises.com: https://pgexercises.com/

How I got started as a developer (& in Postgres) with Andres Freund & Heikki Linnakangas

Episode 8

Friday, October 13, 2023 • Duration 01:13:25

Lots of stories of how folks got started as developers! Andres Freund and Heikki Linnakangas join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore more paths for getting into Postgres on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. How do you do development: with a cup of coffee, with music in the background, maybe at 3am? How do you approach mentoring other developers? Why did you stick with Postgres and make it a career? Lots of lively discussion about building not only code, but relationships in the community, in the open. Also, stories about Heikki’s and Andres’s first Postgres patch submissions, and working via the hackers mailing list. Finally, what advice would you give to your younger self starting in the development world?

Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:

Neon: https://neon.tech/
Rob Conery and Scott Hanselman's book: The Imposter's Handbook (https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/1610805353255677953)
Path To Citus Con Ep04: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/how-i-got-started-as-a-developer-in-postgres
Andres’ first patch to Postgres: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=c43feefa806c81d68115ed03a7f723720cefad31

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

Episode 7

Friday, September 8, 2023 • Duration 01:10:10

The geospatial world of Postgres is so much more than mapping. Paul Ramsey and Regina Obe join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the "where" on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. What are some of the unexpected use cases for PostGIS, one of the most popular extensions to Postgres? How have Large Language Models helped in the geospatial world? Can you really model almost anything with pgRouting? “Where” is the universal foreign key. They talk about communities and governments using geospatial data and how it's very difficult to build a database that does not have some sort of spatial component to it. Why do people care about PostGIS? Find out more about OpenStreetMap and its place in the open source geospatial world. Finally, Paul and Regina share the origin story for the PostGIS extension to Postgres.

Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:

PostGIS: https://postgis.net/
FOSS4G NA: https://foss4gna.org/
Ushahidi: https://www.ushahidi.com/
Humanitarian Open Street Map: https://www.hotosm.org/
OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/
pgRouting: https://pgrouting.org/

You're probably already using Postgres: What you need to know with Chelsea Dole & Floor Drees

Episode 6

Friday, August 11, 2023 • Duration 01:10:01

Drop the fear, not the tables. Chelsea Dole and Floor Drees join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the app developer perspective on Path To Citus Con*, the podcast for developers who love Postgres. If you’re an app developer, you’re probably already using Postgres. Now what? What do you need to know? Are databases your best friend or your worst enemy? They talk about the steps to becoming more Postgres-savvy. Should you go depth-first or breadth-first in order to learn more about the underlying database? What are Postgres extensions and how do you go about adopting them? Find out more about the strength of what Floor calls “boring technology.” Finally, both guests tell stories of their non-traditional entries into Postgres that led to their deep work with databases today.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Fintech startup where Chelsea works, Brex: https://www.brex.com/
Open source data platform where Floor works, Aiven: https://aiven.io/
“Mission-Critical PostgreSQL Databases on Kubernetes" by Karen Jex at KubeCon Europe 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NBQ9JmOMko
The Imposters Handbook by Rob Conery: https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/
Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann:

My favorite ways to learn more about PostgreSQL with Grant Fritchey & Ryan Booz

Episode 5

Friday, July 14, 2023 • Duration 01:18:03

Everyone learns differently. Grant Fritchey and Ryan Booz, database advocates at Redgate focusing on PostgreSQL, talk with Path To Citus Con* co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia to explore the learning resources available to developers and users in all the corners of the PostgreSQL world. What drives you to learn: need or curiosity? What can podcasts teach us while we bike to work? Are conference talks good for growing skills, or are they better for networking? What about books? And do older books still have much to offer? It turns out, most people need much more than one approach to build their knowledge.

Some of the (many) links shared in the order they were mentioned:

Talk: Ryan’s talk Point-in-time query tuning and observability with pg_stat_statements at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2022
Blog: Learning PostgreSQL with Grant, a series for SQL Server devs learning about Postgres
Podcast: postgres.fm, a weekly podcast about all things Postgres
Podcast: Path To Citus Con Episode 01: Working in public on open source
Blog aggregator: Planet PostgreSQL

How I got started as a dev and in Postgres with Melanie Plageman & Thomas Munro

Episode 4

Thursday, July 6, 2023 • Duration 01:17:26

In this episode of Path To Citus Con*, Melanie Plageman, a PostgreSQL hacker working at Microsoft, and Thomas Munro, PostgreSQL developer and committer also at Microsoft talk with co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia. They talk through all the different ways they got started as developers. Does making your first patch to Postgres get you hooked for a lifetime? Do you have to be a tinkerer to be a good software engineer? What is the “toothbrush test”—and how do you make your avocation be your vocation? We hear stories about dropping out of school or dropped out of career fields before they found their true passions in development and Postgres.

Some of the links mentioned in the order they were said:

Parallelism in PostgreSQL 15: Thomas’ Citus Con talk
Additional IO Observability in Postgres with pg_stat_io: Melanie’s Citus Con talk
Visualizing PostgreSQL I/O Performance for Development: Melanie’s talk at PGCon 2023
Add pg_stat_io view, providing more detailed IO statistics, committed by Melanie Plageman in PG 16

Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

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Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other99+

Youtube71

Github29

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other99+

Youtube71

Github29