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17 PostgreSQL Experts for Data-Driven Decisions

postgresql experts - 17 PostgreSQL Experts for Data-Driven Decisions

Here is an updated and carefully curated list of the top PostgreSQL experts worldwide, based on recent open-source contributions, active leadership (while coding) in startups, impactful tech writing and speaking, roles at major companies, and unique achievements in technology competitions:

  1. Heikki Linnakangas

  2. Robert Haas

  3. Andres Freund

  4. Tatsuo Ishii

  5. Joe Conway

  6. Özgun Erdoğan

  7. Dimitri Fontaine

  8. Álvaro Herrera

  9. Paul Copplestone

  10. Craig Kerstiens

  11. Peter Geoghegan

  12. Michael Freedman

  13. Dave Page

  14. Amit Kapila

  15. Magnus Hagander

  16. Hubert Lubaczewski

  17. Peter Eisentraut

Now, let’s delve deeper into their remarkable journeys and lasting impacts.

Heikki Linnakangas

YouTube Video

Nationality: Finnish

Heikki is a PostgreSQL major contributor and core committer known for his extensive work on indexing, replication, and storage engines.

A former engineer at Nokia and Red Hat, Heikki has contributed pivotal features like two-phase commit, improvements to the free space map and visibility map, and various index access methods. He was a key developer of the Postgres-XC project and later joined the team at Neon to build a cloud-native Postgres. Heikki’s code contributions span “much more” than can be listed, and he remains one of the project’s top reviewers and performance experts.

His recent focus includes storage and WAL optimizations for cloud environments, keeping PostgreSQL at the forefront of database technology.

Robert Haas

The goal is not to land features. The goal is to improve PostgreSQL.

Nationality: American

Robert is a long-time PostgreSQL committer and former Chief Database Scientist at EnterpriseDB. He was the principal author of PostgreSQL’s parallel query feature, among numerous other contributions (index-only scans, fast bulk data loading, and more).

In recent years, Robert has consistently been one of the top code contributors – for example, in 2023 he authored the second most lines of code in Postgres commits. Haas also created the CommitFest app that manages Postgres patch submissions. Beyond coding, he is an influential blogger who publishes annual analyses of PostgreSQL contributions and deep dives on upcoming features.

His combination of technical leadership and clear communication has made him a key figure guiding Postgres development for well over a decade.

Andres Freund

Andres Freund - 17 PostgreSQL Experts for Data-Driven Decisions

Nationality: German

Andres is a PostgreSQL committer renowned for his work on database internals and performance.

Now at Microsoft, he works full-time on upstream Postgre development, after earlier stints at Citus Data and 2ndQuadrant. Andres has contributed major features in replication, indexing, I/O, and scalability – including the design of PostgreSQL’s pluggable storage engine and asynchronous I/O improvements. He consistently ranks among the top commit authors each year (with over 100 commits in 2023).

Beyond coding, Andres is a frequent conference speaker on Postgres internals, and his expertise and rigorous patch reviews have earned him tremendous respect in the Postgres community.

Tatsuo Ishii

Nationality: Japanese

Tatsuo is a PostgreSQL pioneer in Japan and the original author of PgPool-II, the popular middleware for Postgres connection pooling and replication.

As a Postgres major contributor, Tatsuo added support for multi-byte character encodings in the 1990s and contributed features like pgbench (Postgres’s benchmarking tool) and pgstattuple. He co-founded SRA OSS Inc. Japan, which has been a hub for Postgres development in Asia. Tatsuo remains PgPool’s project leader, continually improving how Postgres handles high-concurrency workloads. He’s also an active educator – speaking at PostgreSQL conferences in Japanese and English, and helping translate documentation.

With over 30 years in the database field, Tatsuo Ishii’s work has been crucial for PostgreSQL’s internationalization and scalability, earning him global recognition as a Postgres veteran.

Joe Conway

Nationality: American

Joe is a PostgreSQL committer best known for his work extending Postgres with procedural languages and foreign data. He created PL/R, which allows writing Postgres functions in R, and contributed the built-in table functions (generate_series, etc.) and dblink module for cross-database queries.

Joe has been part of PostgreSQL’s core admin team (OSSys, Fundraising) and a past board member of PGUS. After co-founding a PostgreSQL services company, he joined Amazon Web Services, where he works on the RDS Postgres engineering team. Conway has over 20 years of hands-on Postgres experience and often presents on security and administration topics (e.g. SE-Postgres).

As a committer, he continues to contribute patches – recently in areas like row-level security and GUC system – and remains one of the go-to experts on Postgres extensibility and secure database programming.

Özgun Erdoğan

Ozgun Erdogan - 17 PostgreSQL Experts for Data-Driven Decisions

Nationality: Turkish

Özgun is a startup founder-turned-Postgres expert best known as the co-creator of Citus, the PostgreSQL extension for distributed scale-out.

He co-founded Citus Data in 2011 and served as CTO, where he “worked on making PostgreSQL distributed” and became a lifelong Postgres fan. After Citus was acquired by Microsoft, Özgun continued to lead engineering teams in Azure’s Postgres group. In 2023 he co-founded a new startup, Ubicloud, aiming to bring cloud simplicity to open-source Postgres. A hands-on coder, Özgun has deep knowledge of Postgres internals (especially in distributed systems) and remains an active voice in the community through talks and blog posts.

His journey from Amazon engineer to Citus and beyond exemplifies combining startup leadership with PostgreSQL innovation.

Dimitri Fontaine

Nationality: French

Dimitri is a Postgre SQL major contributor from France, known as the “Oracle of Extensions” for his work extending Postgres. He authored the extension framework in PostgreSQL that allows developers to plug new modules into the database.

Dimitri also created pgLoader, a popular tool for migrating databases to Postgres, and contributed the event triggers feature. He is the author of The Art of PostgreSQL (a well-regarded book on Postgres performance and extensibility) and a prolific blogger on all things Postgres. Dimitri has worked as an architect at 2ndQuadrant and Microsoft Azure’s Postgres team, focusing on cloud database services. As a frequent conference speaker and educator, he excels at demystifying Postgres for others.

Fontaine’s blend of deep code contributions and knowledge-sharing has had a lasting impact on Postgres’s extensibility and community know-how.

Alvaro Herrera

Nationality: Chilean

Álvaro is a PostgreSQL core committer from Chile who has been instrumental in developing many advanced features. Active since PostgreSQL 7.2, Álvaro has contributed fixes or features in areas like concurrency, locking, and indexing.

He is credited with integrating autovacuum into the core server, inventing BRIN indexes for efficient handling of huge tables, and helping deliver schema-altering features like shared row locks and partitioning improvements. In recent releases, he drove the effort to implement the SQL-standard MERGE command. Álvaro also helps run PostgreSQL’s online infrastructure and is a regular on mailing lists, mentoring new contributors.

Now based in Germany and working with EnterpriseDB, he is one of the most experienced PostgreSQL developers, valued for his extensive historical knowledge and ongoing fixes that keep PostgreSQL reliable at scale.

Paul Copplestone

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Nationality: New Zealander

Paul is the co-founder and CEO of Supabase, often dubbed the “open-source Firebase alternative” built around PostgreSQL.

A full-stack developer from New Zealand, Paul launched Supabase in 2020 and quickly attracted a huge following among developers by offering instant Postgres databases in the cloud with developer-friendly APIs. Under his leadership, Supabase has raised over $100M (valuing the company at $2B) and grown to 80+ employees distributed globally. Paul still codes and strongly advocates for Postgres – Supabase’s entire backend is a set of Postgres extensions and tools.

An active blogger and Tweeter, he emphasizes open data portability and has helped bring Postgres to a new generation of web and mobile developers through Supabase’s success.

Craig Kerstiens

Nationality: American

Craig is a prominent PostgreSQL advocate, blogger, and product leader who has helped bring Postgres to wider audiences. A former leader of the Heroku Postgres team and product manager at Citus Data/Microsoft, Craig is currently VP of Product at Crunchy Data.

He is well known for his approachable blog posts and guides on PostgreSQL (on craigkerstiens.com and the Postgres Guide series) and for curating Postgres Weekly, a popular newsletter. Craig’s writing and talks cover everything from indexing tips to new Postgres features, making complex topics accessible to developers. Also a frequent conference speaker, he has been an active community member for over 10 years.

By blending deep technical knowledge with clear, friendly communication, Kerstiens has become one of the most influential PostgreSQL evangelists in the world.

Peter Geoghegan

If you want PostgreSQL to behave in a predictable and reliable way, you need to really understand how it thinks.

Nationality: Irish

Peter is an Amazon Web Services engineer and PostgreSQL committer known for driving major advancements in Postgres query performance.

He developed the PostgreSQL UPSERT feature (INSERT … ON CONFLICT), providing a long-awaited solution for upsert operations. Peter also led work on B-Tree index enhancements and significantly improved sorting performance in PostgreSQL, including writing a new external sort algorithm for faster index builds. He created the “amcheck” extension for index integrity and has contributed fixes in critical areas of concurrency and indexing. Peter is recognized for his rigorous approach – often publishing detailed blog posts about database algorithms – and for finding and patching subtle bugs.

His contributions have yielded big gains in Postgres scalability, making him one of the project’s top recent innovators.

Michael Freedman

Michael Freedman - 17 PostgreSQL Experts for Data-Driven Decisions

Nationality: American

Michael is the co-founder and CTO of Timescale, the company behind TimescaleDB – a time-series database built as a PostgreSQL extension.

He is also a Computer Science Professor at Princeton University. Mike helped architect TimescaleDB to enable high-volume time-series data on Postgres, raising over $180M to build a “category-defining” time-series platform. An expert in distributed systems and networking (with accolades like the ACM Grace Hopper Award), Freedman has applied his research prowess to the Postgres world. Under his technical leadership, TimescaleDB integrated features like automatic chunk partitioning and compression into PostgreSQL.

He continues to split his time between academia and industry, ensuring Timescale’s engineering stays cutting-edge. As both a startup CTO and researcher, Mike Freedman bridges theory and practice to expand Postgres capabilities in new directions.

Dave Page

Nationality: British

Dave is a pgSQL core team member and the original creator of pgAdmin, PostgreSQL’s popular graphical administration tool. A contributor since 1998, Dave has also maintained the Windows installers and managed PostgreSQL’s web and infrastructure services for years.

He recently joined pgEdge as VP of Engineering, focusing on distributed “edge” Postgres. Dave’s 25+ years in the project make him one of its most publicly recognizable members – he’s served on the PostgreSQL core committee and helped organize numerous conferences. His work on friendly tooling (like pgAdmin) greatly broadened Postgres’s appeal to developers and DBAs.

Still coding and reviewing patches, Dave Page exemplifies long-term open-source leadership, spanning from writing C code and managing releases to mentoring new community members.

Amit Kapila

Nationality: Indian

Amit is a major PostgreSQL contributor and performance specialist based in India. As a senior engineer at Fujitsu, he has contributed influential features aimed at scaling Postgres: Amit was a lead developer of parallel index scans and joins, helped implement hash indexes with write-ahead logging, and improved overall vacuum and replication performance.

He’s also known for extensive patch review work, guiding features like logical replication and partitioning enhancements to completion. Amit has been involved in PostgreSQL development for over a decade and serves on the PostgreSQL steering committee for releases. He frequently speaks at international Postgres conferences (including PGConf India) sharing benchmarking and tuning insights.

With deep expertise in database internals, Amit Kapila’s work has significantly boosted PostgreSQL’s scalability on modern hardware.

Magnus Hagander

Magnus Hagander - 17 PostgreSQL Experts for Data-Driven Decisions

Nationality: Swedish

Magnus is a PostgreSQL core team member and infrastructure leader based in Sweden. He has contributed to Postgres since the early 2000s, notably doing major work on the Windows port and authentication system that helped PostgreSQL run on more platforms.

Magnus also helps maintain the project’s web services and repository infrastructure, ensuring the global PostgreSQL community runs smoothly. He serves on the board of PostgreSQL Europe and is a frequent speaker and organizer of PostgreSQL events. An open-source advocate, Magnus is often seen answering user questions on mailing lists and social media, as well as co-hosting the “Path To Citus Con” podcast.

His long-standing dedication to both code and community (from core code contributions to keeping servers online) makes him one of Postgres’s most indispensable all-around contributors.

Hubert Lubaczewski

Nationality: Polish

Hubert is a prominent Postgre blogger and performance expert from Poland. His blog “select * from depesz;” has for years been required reading for advanced PostgreSQL topics – from detailed explanations of new features (“Waiting for PostgreSQL …” series) to deep dives into EXPLAIN analysis.

Hubert is also the author of handy tools like the online EXPLAIN analyzer used by DBAs worldwide. As a contributor, he has patched pg_dump and other utilities, and he actively answers questions on mailing lists and forums. He keeps a low profile on social media, but his blog posts have garnered him international recognition in the Postgres community.

When people want to understand why PostgreSQL behaves a certain way or how to optimize a tricky query, Depesz’s writings are often the go-to resource.

Peter Eisentraut

Nationality: German

Peter is a PostgreSQL core team member from Germany and one of the project’s longest-serving contributors. Active in Postgres development for over 20 years, Peter has worked on the build system, portability to new platforms, internationalization, and endless other improvements.

He is responsible for pgSQL’s multi-language support and has been a driving force in maintaining high-quality documentation. Peter also served on the PostgreSQL Release Management team, ensuring smooth, timely releases. Now a Vice President at EnterpriseDB, he continues to contribute code (240+ commits in 2023 alone). Peter is also an occasional book author and blogger, writing about PostgreSQL and SQL standardization.

His meticulous, steady contributions across nearly every PostgreSQL version have made him a backbone of the project’s stability and growth.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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