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

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

From The Peterman Pod by Ryan Peterman

April 20, 2026 ยท 57 min

About this episode

Mike Stonebraker discusses his contributions to database technologies, his disagreements with Google and Amazon, and his current projects.

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. ๐Ÿ”ธ My keyboard Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done ๐—ฃ๐—ผ๐—ฑ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐˜€๐˜ ๐—น๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ธ๐˜€: โ€ข YouTube: https://youtu.be/YPObBOwIrHk โ€ข Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 โ€ข Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/turing-award-winner-postgres-disagreeing ๐—˜๐—ฝ๐—ถ๐˜€๐—ผ๐—ฑ๐—ฒ ๐—น๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ธ๐˜€: โ€ข Red book of database readings: http://www.redbook.io/ โ€ข BEAVER: An Enterprise Benchmark for Text-to-SQL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02038 ๐—ง๐—ถ๐—บ๐—ฒ๐˜€๐˜๐—ฎ๐—บ๐—ฝ๐˜€: 0:00 - Intro 1:03 - How he got into databases 6:43 - Competing with Oracle 9:07 - What made Postgres special 15:55 - One size fits none 21:37 - Why he disagreed with Google 29:14 - Why he chose academia over big tech 30:58 - Replacing state in an OS with a DB 42:02 - Future problems in databases 51:36 - Technical book recommendations to learn databases 52:20 - Advice for younger self 55:52 - Outro ๐—ช๐—ต๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ ๐˜๐—ผโ€ฆ

People in this episode

Host: Ryan Peterman

Guest: Mike Stonebraker

Topics covered

  • database technologies
  • Postgres
  • Google
  • Amazon
  • future problems
  • academic vs big tech

Keywords

  • Turing Award
  • Postgres
  • database technologies
  • Google
  • Amazon
  • future problems
  • academic career

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Google, Amazon, DBOS

Products: Postgres, Red book of database readings, BEAVER

Books & works: Turing Award

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