TP
The Peterman Pod

Turing Award Winner: Postgres, Disagreeing with Google, Future Problems | Mike Stonebraker

April 20, 2026ยท56 min
Episode Description from the Publisher

Mike Stonebraker is a Turing Award winner famous for his contributions to fundamental database technologies. We discussed the story behind building Postgres, where he disagrees with Google/Amazon on databases, and what he's working on now.๐Ÿ”ธ My keyboard Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done๐—ฃ๐—ผ๐—ฑ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐˜€๐˜ ๐—น๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ธ๐˜€:โ€ข YouTube: https://youtu.be/YPObBOwIrHkโ€ข Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835โ€ข Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/turing-award-winner-postgres-disagreeing๐—˜๐—ฝ๐—ถ๐˜€๐—ผ๐—ฑ๐—ฒ ๐—น๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ธ๐˜€:โ€ข Red book of database readings: http://www.redbook.io/โ€ข BEAVER: An Enterprise Benchmark for Text-to-SQL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02038๐—ง๐—ถ๐—บ๐—ฒ๐˜€๐˜๐—ฎ๐—บ๐—ฝ๐˜€:0:00 - Intro1:03 - How he got into databases6:43 - Competing with Oracle9:07 - What made Postgres special15:55 - One size fits none21:37 - Why he disagreed with Google29:14 - Why he chose academia over big tech30:58 - Replacing state in an OS with a DB42:02 - Future problems in databases51:36 - Technical book recommendations to learn databases52:20 - Advice for younger self55:52 - Outro๐—ช๐—ต๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ ๐˜๐—ผ ๐—ณ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ฑ ๐— ๐—ถ๐—ธ๐—ฒ:โ€ข His current company DBOS: https://dbos.dev/ ๐—ช๐—ต๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ ๐˜๐—ผ ๐—ณ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ฑ ๐—ฅ๐˜†๐—ฎ๐—ป:โ€ข Newsletter: https://www.developing.dev/โ€ข X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryanlpetermanโ€ข LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/โ€ข Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpetermanโ€ข Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpetermanโ€ข TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

AI Summary coming soon

Sign up to get notified when the full AI-powered summary is ready.

Get Free Summaries โ†’

Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.

Listen to This Episode

Get summaries like this every morning.

Free AI-powered recaps of The Peterman Pod and your other favorite podcasts, delivered to your inbox.

Get Free Summaries โ†’

Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.