How I got started with DBtune (& why we chose Postgres) with Luigi Nardi

From Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano by Microsoft

January 16, 2026 · 1h 11m · Episode 35

About this episode

Luigi Nardi discusses his journey from academic research to founding DBtune and the choice of Postgres for autonomous database tuning.

Are self-driving databases the Waymos of the future? In Episode 35 of Talking Postgres, Luigi Nardi —founder and CEO of DBtune and Stanford researcher—joins Claire Giordano to explore his journey from academic research to Level 5 autonomous database tuning. We dig into Luigi’s early days with a Commodore 64, how he began his PhD in Paris before he had learned to speak French, and how "professor privilege" in Sweden helped him bootstrap his startup. You’ll learn why the DBtune team chose database tuning and Postgres as their focus, what the Jevons paradox means for the future of developers, and how the “Level 5” vision fuels the DBtune team’s work toward a truly self-driving system. Previously on Talking Postgres: Talking Postgres Ep30: AI for data engineers with Simon Willison Talking Postgres Ep23: How I got started as a developer & in Postgres with Daniel Gustafsson Links mentioned in this episode: CFP: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026’s CFP closes on Sun Feb 1, 2026 @ 11:59pm PST Video of POSETTE 2024 talk: Autotuning PostgreSQL on Azure Flexible Server, by Luigi Nardi Video of PGConf India 2025 talk: ML for Systems and Systems for ML, by Luigi Nardi PGConf India 2025…

People in this episode

Host: Claire Giordano

Guest: Luigi Nardi

Topics covered

database tuning
Postgres
self-driving databases
autonomous systems
academic research
startup journey

Keywords

DBtune
Postgres
self-driving databases
autonomous database tuning
Jevons paradox
startup
academic research

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: DBtune, Stanford, Microsoft

Books & works: Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age, Jevons paradox, Neuro-symbolic AI