Interview with CYBERTEC
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not neccessarily represent those of the PGConf.EU 2022 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
- What is your PostgreSQL centered product?
-
We are a PostgreSQL support company. We offer 24×7 support for PostgreSQL.
This is our core product.
In addition to that we offer Scalefield, which is the ideal in-house cloud based on Kubernetes. It comes with a graphical user interface and helps with full database automation.
Our CYPEX toolchain is a full low code development platform for PostgreSQL which helps to build applications faster than ever.
We also have an extensive graphical tool chain called CYBERTEC migrator which helps people to get rid of Oracle and many other database systems.
- What is your company's mission?
-
We help people to run PostgreSQL efficiently.
- What makes your company a great place to work?
-
Basically people working for us can live anywhere they want. We operate in a decentralized way and we maintain a strong focus on technology by reducing bureaucracy to the absolute minimum. People can work on topics they like most and we try to provide a family friendly work environment which feels more like a family than a company operating world wide.
- How do you foster diversity in your company?
-
We simply do not care if somebody is male, female, black, yellow, white, whatever.
What counts are competence and social interaction. With this kind of mindset one does not have explicitly work on diversity.
By hiring talent from every corner of the world it is there by default.
Talent has no color, no gender and no religion.
- Which of your company's contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference) are you most proud of?
-
We implemented database data rest encryption (PostgreSQL TDE).
But there are many things which come to my head in random order:
- pg_timetable is in my judgement the most flexible scheduler for PostgreSQL out there.
- pgwatch2 is a wonderful monitoring tool and some core contributions help people out there.
- Please share a funny or memorable story about your company and PostgreSQL (support case, dev issue, conference story, …)
-
Oh boy, we were called to fix a performance problem some day. We looked at the code and all we found was “
SELECT * FROM table
”. It was everywhere. No filters, no aggregates, nothing. Simply “SELECT *
”. The reason: “AWHERE
clauses is business logic in the database - it should not be there”. That left us pretty much speechless. - What feature in the last PostgreSQL version benefits your company most?
-
I think
MERGE
is a really cool. People will like that. - Which PostgreSQL extension do you benefit from most, and why?
-
I think PostGIS should be mentioned here. It is simply so comprehensive and of high quality.
- What is the most annoying PostgreSQL problem, and do you have plans or ideas to fix it?
-
There is no such thing as
DROP USER … CASCADE
. That is really an issue.We discussed some ideas but this is not so easy. Users live on the instance level and not inside a database which makes drop user a multi-database operation.
One idea was to have a “kill my user” daemon. But this is kind of ugly.
But I think
DROP USER
is what causes most of the pain. - Which feature is missing in PostgreSQL?
-
In-core column stores, definitely.
What would also be cool: Pluggable FSM strategies.
- Why does your company attend PostgreSQL Conference Europe?
-
We use the event to meet with people we know.
And of course it is a good event to get to know new people.
Overall we simply like the event. It is always good to learn new stuff.