What does it take to make Postgres and Azure fit together cleanly, like puzzle pieces? In Episode 39 of Talking Postgres, Adam Prout—distinguished engineer at Microsoft and a founding architect of Azure HorizonDB—joins Claire to trace his engineering journey from MemSQL to Postgres. We dig into shared-storage architecture and how HorizonDB pushes more work into the storage layer; why the team chose Rust; and what “good systems programming” looks like when being paranoid is a feature, not a bug. Along the way: startup vs big company tradeoffs, and how working on databases exposes you to so many interesting parts of computer science.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep29: How I got started leading database teams with Shireesh Thota

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Blog post: Announcing Azure HorizonDB, by Charles Feddersen & Affan Dar
• CMUDB talk: HorizonDB: Co-Designing Postgres and Azure for Cloud-Native OLTP, by Adam Prout
• Research paper: Socrates: The New SQL Server in the Cloud
• Product page: Azure HorizonDB
• Video of POSETTE 2025 talk: Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI
• Blog post: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users, by Bohan Zhang
• Blog post: Supporting ChatGPT on PostgreSQL in Azure, by Affan Dar, Adam Prout, & Panagiotis Antonopoulos
• Docs: Azure Database for PostgreSQL
• GitHub repo: pgrx
• Discord: PostgreSQL Hacking server
• Conference: PGConf.dev 2026
• Conference Schedule: PGConf.dev 2026 Schedule

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