Heikki Linnakangas, co-founder of Neon and a PostgreSQL expert since 2003, shares insights from his extensive journey in the Postgres community. He discusses the evolution of Postgres governance and the importance of community contributions. The conversation dives into the architecture of Neon, emphasizing serverless databases and latency improvements. Heikki also explores the exciting future of multi-threaded Postgres, addressing its challenges and potential impact on cloud services. Tune in for a wealth of technological insights and personal anecdotes!
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insights INSIGHT
Neon's Fast Serverless Start
Neon’s serverless Postgres launches compute pods on demand, reducing resource waste when idle.
They optimized cold start latency from 5 seconds down to about 700 milliseconds improving user experience.
insights INSIGHT
Separation of Compute and Storage
Neon separates storage into multi-tenant page servers that cache data on object storage like Amazon S3.
This design allows independent scaling of storage and compute and supports features like sleeping databases.
insights INSIGHT
Sleeping Databases for SaaS Multi-tenancy
Many Neon databases go to sleep due to infrequent use, especially in SaaS with one DB per tenant model.
Neon efficiently manages thousands of small, mostly inactive databases with cost-effective sleeping.
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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 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
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