The Peterman Pod

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

Montag, 20. April 2026 · 57 min

MP3

Shownotes

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.

🔸 My keyboard Kickstarter: kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose…

𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:

• YouTube: youtu.be/YPObBOwIrHk
• Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod…
• Transcript: developing.dev/p/turing-award-winner-postgres-…

𝗘𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:

• Red book of database readings: redbook.io
• BEAVER: An Enterprise Benchmark for Text-to-SQL: arxiv.org/abs/2409.02038

𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀:

- Intro
- How he got into databases
- Competing with Oracle
- What made Postgres special
- One size fits none
- Why he disagreed with Google
- Why he chose academia over big tech
- Replacing state in an OS with a DB
- Future problems in databases
- Technical book recommendations to learn databases
- Advice for younger self
- Outro

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗶𝗸𝗲:

• His current company DBOS: dbos.dev

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝘆𝗮𝗻:

• Newsletter: developing.dev
• X/Twitter: x.com/ryanlpeterman
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman
• Threads: threads.com/@ryanlpeterman
• Instagram: instagram.com/ryanlpeterman
• TikTok: tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

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