I Can’t Close 2025 Without Saying Thank You to the People Behind Postgres
A personal reflection on PostgreSQL, open-source gratitude, and the engineers we forget to thank.
It’s December 2025, and I’ve been thinking about gratitude.
Not the performative kind. Not the LinkedIn-optimized, engagement-driven kind. The real kind the kind that keeps you up at night when you realize how much of your work depends on people you’ve never met.
I work with PostgreSQL every day. I build tools around Postgres performance tuning. I share tips about query optimization and database management. I help teams troubleshoot their production PostgreSQL clusters. And somewhere in the middle of this year, a thought started to bother me:
I’ve never properly said thank you.
Not to the database. To the people.
The Seven People Who Steer the PostgreSQL Core Team
Before I go any further, I need to talk about the PostgreSQL Core Team seven engineers who have collectively given decades of their lives to this open-source database project.
These aren’t executives or figureheads. They write code, review patches, fix bugs, and make difficult decisions about the future of a database that powers countless mission-critical systems worldwide.
Peter Eisentraut — Based in Germany, working at EDB. Peter maintains the build system that lets PostgreSQL compile and install smoothly across Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD.
He leads the internationalization effort that makes Postgres accessible in dozens of languages. He writes documentation. He’s been doing this for over 20 years.
Andres Freund — Based in Massachusetts, working at Microsoft. Andres is the engineer behind some of PostgreSQL’s most ambitious recent work: asynchronous I/O, pluggable table access methods, JIT compilation for faster queries, and major contributions to logical replication.
When there’s a deep Postgres performance problem or a gnarly bug that nobody else can figure out, Andres is often the one who solves it.
Magnus Hagander — Based in Stockholm, working at Redpill Linpro. Magnus made it possible for PostgreSQL to run natively on Windows. He rewrote the authentication system.
He helps maintain the postgresql.org websites and infrastructure. Without Magnus, PostgreSQL wouldn’t be the cross-platform enterprise database it is today.
Jonathan Katz — Based in New York, now at Databricks. Jonathan handles project governance the unglamorous work of board meetings, committee decisions, press releases, and event organization.
He also contributes code, reviews patches, and has been instrumental in bringing pgvector into the PostgreSQL ecosystem for AI and machine learning workloads.
Tom Lane — Based in Pittsburgh, working at Snowflake. Tom has been contributing to PostgreSQL for over 25 years. He’s responsible for the query optimizer the component that figures out the fastest way to execute your SQL.
He evaluates bugs, fixes performance issues, and has authored major features like schema support. When you run a complex query and it returns in milliseconds, Tom’s PostgreSQL query optimization work is a big part of why.
Bruce Momjian — Based in Pennsylvania, working at EDB. Bruce co-founded PostgreSQL roughly 25 years ago. He maintains the TODO list that shapes the project’s future.
He writes patches, reviews contributions, and speaks at conferences worldwide. Bruce is the reason PostgreSQL has a coherent roadmap instead of just random features.
Dave Page — Based in the UK, working at pgEdge. Dave created pgAdmin the graphical PostgreSQL database management tool that millions of developers use to interact with Postgres.
He helps run the postgresql.org infrastructure. He serves as Chair of the PostgreSQL Community Association and Secretary of PostgreSQL Europe. Dave builds the bridges between the database and the people who use it.
Seven people form the PostgreSQL Core Team and are responsible for project governance and final decisions.
The Work Behind the Features You Use
PostgreSQL 18 is on the horizon. It brings improvements that will make your databases faster, more secure, more capable.
But I’m not here to write a feature list. I want you to see the human effort behind those features.
When you use table partitioning for your production PostgreSQL workloads, you’re using work that Amit Langote (Microsoft, Tokyo) spent years designing and optimizing. He implemented declarative partitioning in PostgreSQL 10 and has been improving partition pruning and performance ever since.
When you run a query that uses multiple CPU cores, you’re benefiting from Robert Haas (EDB) and Amit Kapila (Fujitsu), who spent years developing parallel query execution one of the most complex Postgres performance features in the modern codebase.
When you use full-text search or JSONB for your application data, you’re using work by Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev (Postgres Professional, Moscow) two engineers who have been building PostgreSQL’s indexing and search capabilities for over 15 years.
They created GiST, GIN, and SP-GiST indexes. They built the full-text search engine. They added hstore and jsonb. They’re currently implementing the SQL/JSON standard.
When you use streaming replication for PostgreSQL high availability and disaster recovery, you’re using work by Fujii Masao (NTT Data, Japan), who developed and refined PostgreSQL’s replication architecture.
When you use logical replication to selectively replicate data between systems, you’re using work by Petr Jelinek (EDB, Czech Republic), who was the principal author of that feature.
When you run VACUUM and it doesn’t block your production queries, you’re benefiting from optimizations by Masahiko Sawada (AWS), who implemented parallel vacuum, the vacuum failsafe, and visibility map improvements essential PostgreSQL best practices for database maintenance.
When you use UPSERT (INSERT ... ON CONFLICT), you’re using work by Peter Geoghegan (AWS, New York), who also dramatically improved B-tree index performance and sort speeds.
When you monitor your database with pg_stat_io views for Postgres performance tuning, you’re using work by Melanie Plageman (Microsoft, Philadelphia), who also contributed parallel hash join improvements and vacuum optimizations.
When you use BRIN indexes for large tables or the MERGE command, you’re using work by Álvaro Herrera (EDB, Germany), who has been contributing to PostgreSQL for nearly two decades.
When you use two-phase commit or benefit from the free space map and visibility map, you’re using work by Heikki Linnakangas (Neon, Finland), one of the most prolific contributors in PostgreSQL history.
When your production PostgreSQL cluster stays online during failures using Patroni, you’re using work by Alexander Kukushkin (Microsoft), who created and maintains this critical PostgreSQL high availability solution that countless enterprise systems depend on.
This is what I mean. Every feature you use has a name attached to it. Often several names. People who spent months or years getting it right.
The Invisible Infrastructure
But it’s not just the features.
PostgreSQL exists as a usable, installable, well-documented database because of infrastructure work that most users never see.
Devrim Gündüz (EDB, UK) coordinates RPM packaging for Red Hat, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Fedora, and SUSE. When you run yum install postgresql for your enterprise PostgreSQL deployment, Devrim’s work makes that possible.
Christoph Berg (Cybertec, Germany) builds the Debian and Ubuntu packages for apt.postgresql.org. When you run apt install postgresql, Christoph’s work makes that possible.
Dave Cramer (AWS, Florida) has maintained the PostgreSQL JDBC driver since 1999. Twenty-six years of making sure Java applications can talk to Postgres.
Andrew Dunstan (EDB, North Carolina) maintains the buildfarm the automated testing system that runs regression tests across dozens of platforms to catch bugs before they reach production PostgreSQL users.
Michael Paquier (AWS, Tokyo) is one of the patch reviewers and bug fixers in recent years. He writes TAP tests, manages commit fests, and quietly ensures the quality of every release.
Stefan Kaltenbrunner (Austria) helps manage PostgreSQL’s online infrastructure the servers, websites, and mailing lists that keep the project running.
Tatsuo Ishii (SRA OSS, Japan) added multibyte character support in the 1990s, wrote pgbench (the benchmarking tool used for Postgres performance testing), and still maintains PgPool-II and the Japanese documentation translation.
This is the work that doesn’t get headlines. But without it, PostgreSQL wouldn’t exist as a production-ready enterprise database.
Companies That Invest Back Into PostgreSQL
I want to be specific about which companies employ PostgreSQL contributors, because this investment matters for the sustainability of open-source database development.
Microsoft employs contributors including Andres Freund, Thomas Munro, Melanie Plageman, David Rowley, Amit Langote, Tomas Vondra, Daniel Gustafsson, Ashutosh Bapat, Alexander Kukushkin, and Claire Giordano. The engineers work on PostgreSQL query optimization, vacuum performance, partitioning, I/O statistics, and core infrastructure.
Claire Giordano leads PostgreSQL community advocacy, organizing events, creating educational content, and building bridges between Microsoft and the Postgres community. Microsoft manages open-source PostgreSQL development under a VP of Engineering Affan Dar, a structural investment in keeping this enterprise database healthy.
Amazon Web Services employs contributors including Nathan Bossart, Masahiko Sawada, Michael Paquier, Bertrand Drouvot, John Naylor, Peter Geoghegan, Dave Cramer, Joe Conway, Jeff Davis, and Jim Nasby. They work on archiving, logical replication, vacuum, security, JDBC drivers, and PostgreSQL query execution.
EDB (EnterpriseDB) employs contributors including Peter Eisentraut, Robert Haas, Andrew Dunstan, Álvaro Herrera, Devrim Gündüz, Richard Guo, Petr Jelinek, Jacob Champion, Gabriele Bartolini, Pavan Deolasee, Akshay Joshi, and Euler Taveira de Oliveira. They work on parallel query, partitioning, replication, packaging, and the build system.
Neon employs Heikki Linnakangas and Anastasia Lubennikova, who work on indexing, transactions, and recovery.
Supabase employs Alexander Korotkov, who works on pluggable index access methods and SQL/JSON implementation.
NTT and NTT Data (Japan) support Kyotaro Horiguchi, Fujii Masao, Etsuro Fujita, and Atsushi Torikoshi, who work on WAL, replication, and foreign data wrappers.
Fujitsu supports Amit Kapila, Vigneshwaran C, Ajin Cherian, Hayato Kuroda, Peter Smith, and Hou Zhijie, who work on parallel query, replication, and various core features.
Postgres Professional (Russia) supports Oleg Bartunov, Teodor Sigaev, and Nikita Glukhov, who work on indexing, full-text search, and JSON features.
Cybertec supports Laurenz Albe, Christoph Berg, Ants Aasma, and Pavlo Golub, who work on extensions, packaging, and community support.
Snowflake employs Tom Lane, Greg Sabino Mullane, and Paul Ramsey, who work on the optimizer, monitoring tools, and geospatial features.
Google Cloud employs Noah Misch and Hannu Krosing, who work on security, data integrity, and patch review.
Dalibo (France) supports Damien Clochard, Gilles Darold, and Jehan-Guillaume de Rorthais, contributing to PostgreSQL tools and French community support.
2ndQuadrant/EDB legacy contributors include Abhijit Menon-Sen and Craig Ringer, who have contributed significantly to replication and core features.
I don’t have complete numbers for every company. If you work at Crunchy Data, Timescale, or another organization that employs PostgreSQL contributors, I’d genuinely like to know more. These people deserve visibility.
The Broader PostgreSQL Community: Major Contributors
The PostgreSQL 17 development cycle had 463 contributors people who wrote patches, reviewed code, tested features, and reported issues. This is what makes open-source database development work.
Laurenz Albe (Cybertec, Austria) — LDAP lookup for connection parameters, the passwordcheck security module, maintainer of oracle_fdw, and tireless helper on Stack Overflow and mailing lists.
Ashutosh Bapat (Microsoft, India) — Partition-wise joins, advanced partition matching, postgres_fdw join/aggregate/sort pushdown, and countless bug fixes in partitioning and logical replication.
Oleg Bartunov (Postgres Professional, Russia) — GiST, GIN, SP-GiST indexes, full-text search, KNN search, hstore, jsonb, pg_trgm fuzzy search, and ongoing SQL/JSON standard implementation.
Christoph Berg (Cybertec, Germany) — Debian and Ubuntu PostgreSQL packages, postgresql-unit extension, conference speaker, and IRC community support.
Andrey Borodin (Yandex Cloud, Russia) — GiST improvements, patch review, mentoring junior developers, and maintainer of WAL-G, Odyssey, and SPQR.
Nathan Bossart (AWS, USA) — Enhancements to archiving, documentation, intrinsics, roles/privileges, security, shared memory, signal handling, and vacuum.
Jacob Champion (EDB, USA) — OAuth2/OIDC authentication for PostgreSQL 18, security improvements, and high-quality patch contributions.
Joe Conway (AWS, USA) — Set-returning functions, PL/R, dblink, tablefunc/crosstab, polymorphic arguments, generate_series, pg_settings, has_*_privilege functions, and community leadership.
Dave Cramer (AWS, USA) — JDBC driver maintainer since 1999, ODBC contributions, and PL/R work.
Jeff Davis (AWS, USA) — Hash aggregation disk spill, exclusion constraints, range types, checksums, and patch reviews.
Bertrand Drouvot (AWS, France) — Logical decoding from standby, per-backend I/O and WAL statistics, SYSTEM_USER function, and regex support in pg_hba.conf.
Andrew Dunstan (EDB, USA) — Configuration/logging enhancements, dollar quoting, CSV import/export, PL/Perl improvements, Win32 port, parallel pg_restore, JSON features, and buildfarm maintainer.
Vik Fearing (France) — Co-founder of pgDay Paris, PostgreSQL Europe conference organizer, mailing list moderator, IRC operator, and Code of Conduct Committee member.
Jelte Fennema-Nio (MotherDuck, Netherlands) — libpq and protocol contributions, PgBouncer maintainer, pg_duckdb developer, and CommitFest app/CFBot maintainer.
Etsuro Fujita (NTT, Japan) — Numerous postgres_fdw improvements for better remote query efficiency.
Peter Geoghegan (AWS, USA) — B-tree enhancements, sort performance improvements, amcheck module, and INSERT...ON CONFLICT (UPSERT).
Devrim Gündüz (EDB, UK) — RPM packaging coordinator for Red Hat/Rocky/Alma/Fedora/SUSE, and PostgreSQL website maintenance.
Richard Guo (EDB, China) — Query planner and executor improvements, bug fixes, and patch reviews.
Daniel Gustafsson (Microsoft, Sweden) — Code contributions and advocacy efforts.
Robert Haas (EDB, USA) — Principal author of parallel query, unlogged tables, fast-path locking, index-only scans, incremental backup, server-side backup compression, and creator of the original CommitFest app.
Stacey Haysler (PGX, USA) — President of PgUS, San Francisco Bay Area PUG organizer, creator of the Community Code of Conduct, and CoC Committee chair (2018-2021).
Álvaro Herrera (EDB, Germany) — Fixed CLUSTER, savepoints, shared row locking, dependency tracking, autovacuum integration, background workers, BRIN indexes, partitioning DDL, libpq pipeline mode, MERGE command, and infrastructure maintenance.
Kyotaro Horiguchi (NTT, Japan) — WAL, recovery, replication improvements, multibyte handling, Japanese message translation, and patch review.
Tatsuo Ishii (SRA OSS, Japan) — Multi-byte support, CREATE CONVERSION, pgbench, pgstattuple, pgrowlocks, Japanese doc translation, and PgPool-II creator.
Petr Jelinek (EDB, Czech Republic) — Logical replication, DO statement, GRANT ON ALL, ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES, TABLESAMPLE, and PgBouncer maintenance.
Stefan Kaltenbrunner (Austria) — PostgreSQL infrastructure administration and website maintenance.
Amit Kapila (Fujitsu, India) — Co-developer of parallel query, durable hash indexes, and extensive performance testing.
Alexander Korotkov (Supabase, Lithuania) — Pluggable index access methods, SQL/JSON implementation, GiST/GIN advances, spatial/fuzzy search algorithms, and multicore optimizations.
Alexander Lakhin — Quality assurance, testing, and bug hunting across the codebase.
Amit Langote (Microsoft, Japan) — Declarative table partitioning, pg_stat_progress_vacuum, partition elimination, and partitioning performance improvements.
Guillaume Lelarge (Dalibo, France) — French translations for docs and tools, and patches to PostgreSQL and related tools.
Heikki Linnakangas (Neon, Finland) — Two-phase commit, FSM and VM redesign, replication/transaction contributions, indexing improvements, and much more.
Anastasia Lubennikova (Neon, Cyprus) — B-Tree, GiST, GIN, SP-GiST improvements, GSoC mentor, and conference speaker.
Fujii Masao (NTT Data, Japan) — Streaming replication and synchronous replication.
Noah Misch (Google Cloud, USA) — Security, data integrity, and rigorous patch review.
Thomas Munro (Microsoft, New Zealand) — Parallel query, SERIALIZABLE isolation, triggers, recovery/replication, LLVM/JIT, storage/IO, OS portability, and CI/cfbot maintenance.
John Naylor (AWS, Thailand) — System catalog performance, Unicode handling, and intrinsics optimizations.
Michael Paquier (AWS, Japan) — Extensive code review, bug fixes, TAP testing, and commit fest management.
Melanie Plageman (Microsoft, USA) — pg_stat_io views, vacuum performance improvements, parallel hash joins, bug fixes, and PGConf.dev organizing.
Paul Ramsey (Snowflake, Canada) — Extension support in postgres_fdw, PostGIS co-founder, HTTP extension, and OGR FDW.
Dean Rasheed (UK) — Deferrable unique constraints, INSTEAD OF triggers, updatable views, WITH CHECK OPTION, numeric precision improvements, row-level security co-author, and MERGE improvements.
Julien Rouhaud (Nile, Taiwan) — Code contributions, patch reviews, documentation translation, PoWA and HypoPG projects, and PostgreSQL Europe board.
David Rowley (Microsoft, New Zealand) — Memoize operator, partial/parallel aggregation, runtime partition pruning, planner improvements, and memory allocator optimizations.
Greg Sabino Mullane (Snowflake, USA) — DBD::Pg maintainer, Bucardo creator, check_postgres.pl author, and advocacy.
Masahiko Sawada (AWS, USA) — Freeze map, parallel vacuum, vacuum failsafe, TidStore, logical replication improvements, and bug fixes.
Andreas Scherbaum (Germany) — 25+ years of community service, conference organizing, PostgreSQL Europe board, German PostgreSQL book author, and postgresql.life interview series.
Teodor Sigaev (Postgres Professional, Russia) — GiST, GIN indexes, full-text search, SQL/JSON, and extension development.
Steve Singer (Canada) — Slony author, PostgreSQL Community Association treasurer and secretary.
Pavel Stehule (Czech Republic) — Numerous PL/pgSQL enhancements over many years.
Robert Treat (USA) — SPI Liaison for Postgres Funds Group, Slack admin, sponsorship committee, former PgUS President, former web team member, PostgreSQL Weekly News founder, and contributor to phpPgAdmin, OmniPITR, pg_jobmon, pg_partman, and others.
Tomas Vondra (Microsoft, Czech Republic) — CREATE STATISTICS, pageinspect improvements, ANALYZE enhancements, distinct value estimates, hash join optimizations, and memory allocators.
Mark Wong (EDB, USA) — Performance characterization, pg_top/pg_systat/pg_proctab author, GSoC mentor, Portland PUG co-organizer, and release artwork creator.
Significant Contributors: The Extended Community
PostgreSQL thrives because of an extended community of Significant Contributors who work on patches, extensions, documentation, testing, tooling, and community building. Every name here represents someone who chose to invest their time in making PostgreSQL better:
Ants Aasma (Cybertec), Ashwin Agrawal, Aleksander Alekseev (TigerData), Jimmy Angelakos, Lætitia Avrot, Michael Banck, Gabriele Bartolini (EDB), Ian Barwick, Anthonin Bonnefoy (Datadog), Erwin Brandstetter, Michael Brewer, Polina Bungina, Vigneshwaran C (Fujitsu), Jaime Casanova, Marc Cave-Ayland, Jeevan Chalke, Ajin Cherian (Fujitsu), Michael Christofides (pgMustard), Damien Clochard (Dalibo), Fabien Coelho, James Coleman, Sarah Conway, Gilles Darold, Pavan Deolasee (EDB), Mark Dilger, Dmitry Dolgov, Henrietta Dombrovskaya, Floor Drees, Chris Ellis, Andy Fan, Stefan Fercot, Lukas Fittl, Chapman Flack, Dimitri Fontaine, Elizabeth Garrett Christensen, Claire Giordano (Microsoft), Nikita Glukhov (Postgres Professional), Michael Goldberg, Pavlo Golub (Cybertec), Takatsuka Haruka (SRA OSS), Emre Hasegeli, Jian He, Bernd Helmle, Antonin Houska, Cary Huang (HighGo), Corey Huinker, Sami Imseih, Jeff Janes, Karen Jex, David Johnston, Akshay Joshi (EDB), Paul Jungwirth, Andrew Kane, Valeria Kaplan (Data Egret), Andreas Karlsson, Amit Khandekar, Kosuke Kida, Adrian Klaver, Alexey Klyukin, Konstantin Knizhnik, KaiGai Kohei (HeteroDB), Georgios Kokolatos, Alexey Kondratov, Sergei Kornilov, Joseph Koshakow, Ilya Kosmodemiansky (Data Egret), Dirk Krautschick, Hannu Krosing (Google), Alexander Kukushkin (Microsoft), Dilip Kumar, Hayato Kuroda (Fujitsu), Jeevan Ladhe, Rushabh Lathia, Andrei Lepikhov, Japin Li, Hubert Lubaczewski (depesz), Shveta Malik, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker, Boriss Mejias, Abhijit Menon-Sen (2ndQuadrant), Zhang Mingli (HashData), Yugo Nagata (SRA OSS), Jim Nasby (Amazon), Marco Nenciarini (Debian), Regina Obe, Euler Taveira de Oliveira (EDB), Christophe Pettus (PGExperts), Justin Pryzby, Jürgen Purtz, Craig Ringer (2ndQuadrant), Jehan-Guillaume de Rorthais (Dalibo), Fabrízio de Royes Mello, Bharath Rupireddy, Nikolay Samokhvalov (postgres.ai), Juan José Santamaría Flecha, Sandro Santilli, Hans-Jürgen Schönig (Cybertec), Andreas Seltenreich, Ashutosh Sharma, Vladimir Sitnikov, Peter Smith (Fujitsu), Taketomo Sone, Greg Stark, David Steele (pgBackRest), Amul Sul, Koichi Suzuki, Marko Tiikkaja, Atsushi Torikoshi (NTT Data), Takayuki Tsunakawa, Matthias van de Meent, Daniele Varrazzo, Daniel Vérité, Ranier Vilela, Tender Wang, Daniel Westermann (dbi services), David Wheeler, Erik Wienhold, Tatsuro Yamada, Nazir Bilal Yavuz, Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek, Junwang Zhao, and Hou Zhijie (Fujitsu).
Past Major Contributors: The Foundation Builders
PostgreSQL wouldn’t exist without the Past Major Contributors who built foundational features. Though many are no longer active, their work lives on in every query you run:
Josh Berkus (Red Hat, Portland) — Core Team Emeritus. Josh was one of PostgreSQL’s most visible advocates and community leaders for many years. Now works on Kubernetes.
David Fetter (California) — Advocacy pioneer, implemented the FILTER clause for aggregates, founded PostgreSQL Weekly News, and contributed countless patch reviews.
Marc G. Fournier (EDB, Victoria BC) — Coordinated the entire early PostgreSQL effort, administered postgresql.org websites, mailing lists, FTP site, and the source code repository. Marc built the infrastructure that made everything else possible.
Stephen Frost (Crunchy Data, Virginia) — Security improvements that reduced the need for superuser access, GRANT improvements including column-level permissions, predefined roles, GSSAPI/Kerberos encryption and delegation.
Andrew Gierth (UK) — Hstore enhancements, ordered aggregates, ordered set functions, grouping sets (a major SQL feature), ip4r extension, and decades of IRC help and support.
Thomas G. Lockhart (JPL, Pasadena) — Early documentation work, date/time and geometric data types, and SQL standards compliance — foundational work from PostgreSQL’s earliest days.
Michael Meskes (credativ, Düsseldorf) — Wrote ecpg, the embedded SQL in C preprocessor that allows C programs to contain SQL statements.
Vadim B. Mikheev (San Francisco) — Undertook some of PostgreSQL’s most fundamental projects: VACUUM, subselects, triggers, Write-Ahead Log (WAL), and Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC). MVCC is the core of how PostgreSQL handles concurrent transactions — every production PostgreSQL system depends on Vadim’s work.
Simon Riggs (Bedfordshire, UK) — Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR), table partitioning, Hot Standby, Synchronous Replication, security enhancements, performance and scalability work, and high availability features. Simon shaped how production PostgreSQL deployments handle disaster recovery and replication.
Jan Wieck (pgEdge, Pennsylvania) — Designed and implemented Slony (one of PostgreSQL’s first replication systems), overhauled the query rewrite rule system, wrote PL/pgSQL and PL/Tcl procedural languages, added foreign keys, the bgwriter background process, the statistics collector, and the TOAST system for large objects. Jan’s contributions are in every PostgreSQL installation.
Past Contributors: Everyone Who Helped Build PostgreSQL
The following people contributed to PostgreSQL over the years. Some contributed code, some contributed documentation, some contributed testing and bug reports. All of them helped make PostgreSQL what it is today:
Julian Assange, Gevik Babakhani, David Bennett, Dennis Björklund, Alexey Borzov, Zoltán Böszörményi, Emily Boyd, Christopher Browne, Tim Bunce, D’Arcy Cain, Emmanuel Checchet, Andrew Chernow, Sean Chittenden, Justin Clift, Neil Conway, Mithun Cy, Massimo Dal Zotto, Selena Deckelmann, Dr. George D. Detlefsen, Korry Douglas, Joshua Drake, Chris Dunlop, J. Douglas Dunlop, Oliver Elphick, Francisco Figueiredo, Michael Fuhr, Brian E. Gallew, Michael Glaesemann, Kevin Grittner, Cees de Groot, Thomas Hallgren, John Hansen, Hitoshi Harada, Jonah Harris, Alex Hunsaker, Hiroshi Inoue, Brendan Jurd, Kris Jurka, Christopher Kings-Lynne, Mark Kirkwood, Manfred Koizar, Haribabu Kommi, Sergey E. Koposov, Zdenek Kotala, Marko Kreen, Anoop Kumar, Randy Kunkee, Francalanci Leonardo, Kurt J. Lidl, Barry Lind, Robert Lor, Dan McGuirk, Roberto Mello, Ernst Molitor, Peter Mount, Fernando Nasser, Claudio Natoli, Matthew T. O’Connor, Lamar Owen, Mike Palmiotto, Andreas Pflug, Marti Raudsepp, Ross J. Reedstrom, Thomas van Reimersdahl, Larry Rosenman, Hiroshi Saito, Sergej Sergeev, Jignesh Shah, Gavin Sherry, Michael Siebenborn, Guillaume Smet, Greg Smith, Erich Stamberger, Adam Sussman, Sven Suursoho, Stephan Szabo, ITAGAKI Takahiro, Rod Taylor, Surafel Temesgen, Yamada Tsutomu, Reini Urban, Jan Urbański, Martijn van Oosterhout, Paul “Shag” Walmsley, Philip Warner, Rick Weldon, Joachim Wieland, Jason Wright, Karel Zak, Andreas Zeugswetter, and Qingqing Zhou.
Why I Share Postgres Knowledge
I share PostgreSQL tips on LinkedIn almost daily. I build tools for query analysis and Postgres performance tuning. And I need to be honest about something:
none of this would be possible without the contributors I’ve listed above.
Every optimization tip I share is only meaningful because Tom Lane spent years perfecting the query optimizer. Every PostgreSQL partitioning recommendation works because Amit Langote implemented it correctly. Every monitoring insight depends on pg_stat views that contributors built and refined.
I’m not creating knowledge. I’m translating knowledge that others created.
The least I can do is acknowledge that.
Why PostgreSQL Succeeds
PostgreSQL is one of the most popular databases in the world. That didn’t happen because of marketing or hype.
It happened because the engineering is excellent.
Flexibility — PostgreSQL handles relational data, JSON, geospatial queries, full-text search, vector embeddings for AI, and time-series workloads. One database, many use cases.
Reliability — Financial institutions, healthcare systems, and government agencies trust production PostgreSQL deployments with their most sensitive data.
Extensibility — Projects like PostGIS, pgvector, TimescaleDB, and Citus build on PostgreSQL.
Standards compliance — PostgreSQL takes SQL standards seriously. Features like MERGE, SQL/JSON, and grouping sets are implemented correctly.
Community governance — No single company controls PostgreSQL. The project is managed by contributors from dozens of organizations worldwide. This is what makes it a true open-source database.
This quality doesn’t come from hype. It comes from engineering discipline, applied consistently over 30+ years by people who cared about getting it right.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Open-Source Databases
Here’s what I’ve been sitting with: we take open source for granted.
Every day, teams spin up production PostgreSQL clusters without a second thought. It’s just there. It works. It scales. It recovers from failures. We build businesses on it, we serve millions of users with it, and we rarely pause to ask who made this possible.
Managed PostgreSQL services are excellent Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Crunchy Bridge, Neon, Supabase. Customers are happy with these enterprise PostgreSQL offerings. But beneath every managed service is the same open-source PostgreSQL that contributors have been building for decades.
The convenience layer is paid for. The engineering underneath came from a community.
A Request
If you’re reading this and your team runs PostgreSQL in production whether self-hosted or using managed PostgreSQL services I have a request.
Share your architecture.
Not to brag. Not for marketing. Just to show what’s real.
What does your production PostgreSQL setup look like? How many nodes? What workloads does it handle? What would break if PostgreSQL wasn’t there? What PostgreSQL best practices have you learned along the way?
The more we make visible the real mission-critical systems running on PostgreSQL, the more we remind ourselves and others that this isn’t just a hobby project. It’s enterprise database infrastructure that businesses depend on.
Closing 2025 Honestly
It feels wrong to close this year without saying this directly.
Thank you to the PostgreSQL contributors and community.
To Peter, Andres, Magnus, Jonathan, Tom, Bruce, and Dave the PostgreSQL Core Team who have been steering this project for decades.
To the major contributors who implemented the features we use every day Amit, Robert, Oleg, Teodor, Heikki, Álvaro, Fujii, Petr, Masahiko, Peter G., Melanie, David, Tomas, Alexander K., and dozens more.
To the infrastructure maintainers Devrim, Christoph, Dave Cramer, Andrew, Michael, Stefan, Tatsuo.
To Alexander Kukushkin for Patroni, which keeps production PostgreSQL clusters running with high availability.
To Claire Giordano for tireless community advocacy and making PostgreSQL more visible and accessible.
To the past major contributors who built the foundation Josh, David F., Marc, Stephen, Andrew G., Thomas, Michael M., Vadim, Simon, and Jan.
To every significant contributor and past contributor named above your work matters.
To the 463 contributors who shaped PostgreSQL 17 and the many more working on PostgreSQL 18.
To the community organizers, documentation writers, translators, conference speakers, and mailing list moderators who make PostgreSQL accessible worldwide.
Gratitude doesn’t pay anyone’s rent. It doesn’t fund conference travel or cover the opportunity cost of reviewing patches instead of shipping products. But I believe it still matters ethically and professionally.
When we benefit from someone’s work, acknowledging that benefit is the minimum.
So here’s my acknowledgment, as 2025 comes to a close:
PostgreSQL is mission-critical infrastructure for countless organizations worldwide. It exists because hundreds of people chose to invest their time, knowledge, and engineering discipline into something they would never fully own.
That choice made my work possible. That choice made your production systems possible.
Thank you.
If your organization uses PostgreSQL in production and you’d like to share your architecture, I’d welcome hearing from you. And if I’ve missed contributors who deserve recognition, please let me know. These people should be seen.