Interview with Percona
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.
- In which areas do you expect PostgreSQL to grow most and how does your company contribute to and benefit from that growth?
Performance:
PostgreSQL has been adding new features that target performance and we feel that this will continue to be an area of growth for the project. Performance goes hand in hand with observability so you can tune for your use case. Add on top of this growing demand for horizontal scaling. As PostgreSQL’s adoption grows in the enterprise, we believe that the need for performance will continue to increase and PostgreSQL’s observability stack will continue to grow with it.
This is close to our heart as Percona’s legacy has been built on being the database performance experts. Percona staffs major contributors to pgpool and postgres_fdw and continues to collaborate in other areas of database performance. Percona also offers pg_stat_monitor—an open source extension to PostgreSQL—for advanced query analytics.
We believe that Percona will benefit from this continued growth by being able to map our customers’ use cases to new performance features, allowing our customers to fully utilize the rich feature set offered by PostgreSQL. Combined with PMM—our database monitoring tool—we believe we can help our users drill down into problematic queries and troubleshoot them.
- What is your PostgreSQL centered product?
Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a phenomenal piece of software—reliable, robust, feature-rich, performant. For any serious production deployment, however, the database engine needs to be combined with other tools that help with clustering, high availability, disaster recovery, monitoring & observability. On top of that, the cluster needs to be deployable reliably and in a repeatable manner that’s certified by a trusted vendor.
Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL aims to bring together the components needed to spin up a reliable production cluster for PostgreSQL. Our Kubernetes operator ensures that the components are orchestrated reliably and repeatably, while PMM serves as the monitoring and query analytics tool for peak performance of the cluster. Percona certifies the distribution after thorough testing and then backs it up by its renowned 24/7 Support and Managed Services.
- What is your company’s mission?
We believe an open world is a better world. Our mission is to enable everyone to innovate freely, by providing the best open source database software, support, and services.
- What makes your company a great place to work?
Percona is a high-growth database company with a great passion for maintaining the true spirit of open source and the freedom that comes with it. We are remote-first and globally dispersed, with colleagues in more than 50 countries. We offer a collaborative, highly-engaged culture where your ideas are welcome and your voice is heard.
Our staff receives generous benefits including flexible work hours and paid time off, all your equipment for your remote office, funds for career development (external training, certifications, conferences), and the opportunity to participate in an equity incentive plan.
- Which feature is missing in PostgreSQL?
One question that PostgreSQL does not have a good answer for and is asked very frequently by our customers is the ability to encrypt data at rest. Increasing regulatory compliance, frequent attempts at data breach, the need for geo-fencing of data, and increased digitization across the world all combine to ramp-up the demand for features to protect data. PostgreSQL does an excellent job of answering most of these demands. Encryption for data at rest, however, remains unanswered.