359: The Enduring Popularity of Postgres, and what lies ahead (With Snowflake's Craig Kerstiens)

In this episode, David Rubinstein talks with Craig Kerstiens, Snowflake's Director of Software Engineering on Postgres, about the enduring popularity of Postgres, a 30-year-old database technology, due to its reliability and recent innovations like JSON support and vector store databases. He highlighted the challenge of integrating operational (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) data for AI applications, noting the importance of reducing latency and operational burden. Kerstiens introduced PG Lake, an open-source tool that embeds Iceberg in Postgres, simplifying data movement and querying. He also mentioned Snowflake's mirroring feature and the future of Postgres, emphasizing its continuous improvement and extension ecosystem.