Interview with Xata
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of the PGConf.EU 2023 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
- In which areas do you expect PostgreSQL to grow most and how does your company contribute to and benefit from that growth?
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Before answering the question on the areas of growth, we’d first like to highlight the qualities of PostgreSQL that we hope will NOT change: reliability, stability, security, and openness. These are what make PostgreSQL be PostgreSQL, and they shouldn’t be sacrificed when looking for growth areas.
That said, we think there is room to simplify some operational aspects and improve the developer experience of PostgreSQL, and this is Xata’s immediate mission. In particular, we’re working on better developer workflows for schema changes (see the pgroll open source project), change data capture, as well as observability and insights.
We’re also excited about pgrx, because of its ability to bring custom extensions written in Rust to existing Cloud providers. This will make it much easier for extensions to be distributed and gain in popularity.
- What is your PostgreSQL centered product?
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We’d like to highlight two of them:
The pgroll open source project offers zero-downtime, reversible, schema migrations for PostgreSQL. It works by creating virtual schemas by using views on top of the physical tables. This allows for performing all the necessary changes needed for a migration without affecting the existing clients.
The Xata.io service is a postgres data platform, meaning that you get a serverless PostgreSQL service, but also extra features like branching, automatic replication to Elasticsearch for full-text search, and file attachments to your database rows.
- What makes your company a great place to work?
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At Xata we’re on a mission to radically simplify the way developers work with data, and we do that via our serverless data platform powered by PostgreSQL. This ambitious mission requires deep knowledge of database technologies, which we combine with world class DX and UX talent to create a truly magical experience.
We have deep roots in open source and we intend to open source most of our tech into stand-alone projects (for example, pgroll). So you get to work on a truly innovative product with a team who cares deeply about the success of users, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
We care about building a healthy and inclusive culture. Everyone's circumstances are different so we also put a lot of value on work-life balance and flexibility. We know that in order to build a lasting company, we need to think like we are in a marathon, not a sprint. How? We don’t track hours, we all work remotely distributed across multiple countries, and are an asynchronous workplace. So you have the flexibility to work where and how you work best.