20 years of hacking Postgres with Heikki Linnakangas (cofounder of Neon)

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:
Mastering Postgres Course: https://masteringpostgres.com/?ref=yt
Let's make postgres multi-threaded: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id...
Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...

Follow Heikki:
LinkedIn:   / heikki-linnakangas-6b58bb203  
Website: https://neon.tech

Follow Aaron:
Twitter:   / aarondfrancis  
LinkedIn:   / aarondfrancis  
Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more.

Database school on YouTube:    • Database School  
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