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 2024 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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At the moment we see that large companies are moving to PostgreSQL.Often these are migration projects because commercial databases s uch as Oracle und MS SQL are simply too expensive to run at large scale.However, what is important to note: Back in the old days migration was only about money - not it is also about technical superiority of Open Source in general.We are a provider of PostgreSQL support and we help companies around the world. This means that we benefit directly from anything PostgreSQL related.
- What is your PostgreSQL centered product and what makes it unique?
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We offer „full stack PostgreSQL“.This means we offer … - 24x7 support for PostgreSQL - consulting and training - Scalefield: Full Kubernetes automation for PostgreSQL - CYBERTEC MIgrator: A fully visual tool chain for PostgreSQL to handle migrations - CYPEX: A full replacement for Oracle APEX and Oracle forms In addition there are many things such as monitoring tools (pgwatch), scheduling (pg_timetable), faceting and a lot more.I guess we are pretty much the only ones around who got everything from automation to zero-downtime support covered.
- What makes your company a great place to work?
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Here at CYBERTEC we are more like a family. People know each other, we go on vacation together, people are friends privately and we seriously believe in a friendly, productive work environment.Nobody wants to be a number and people like the transparency we got.Firing people without being given a reason is not the way we work. People are important - people matter.If you want people to go additional miles in case of trouble one has to treat them like humans during times when there is no crisis.I guess that is the secret. Loyalty has to be mutual and honest.
- How do you foster diversity in your company?
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We don’t and we never will. We hire competent people and get rid of incompetent ones.Nobody is hired for being green, blue, yellow, orange, gay, religious or whatever.We hire because of competence, social interaction and technical need. This implicitly leads to diversity because competence does not have colors and it does not have religion.Imagine you only got a job because you are a woman and you know that this is the only reason? That is pure humiliation.We hire people because they are GOOD and not because they belong to a group. Discussing diversity implicitly makes a difference already. There is no difference. There are good people and bad people. In short: I am not interested in discussing people’s gender or whatever - it turns me off completely. I am interested in good socialinteraction and competence. Nothing else matters - everything else is a pure waste of energy.
- Which of your company's contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference) are you most proud of?
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Phew, this is hard to say. I think pgfaceting, pg_timetable and some optimizer patches are really cool.At the end of the day it depends on people’s needs. Some might like the oracle_fdw - others might enjoy pgwatch more.We got over 80 open projects in github. Things just serve different purposes.
- What feature in the last PostgreSQL version benefits your company most?
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It is hard to name one because it always depends on the use case. What I really love is what Laurenz Albe added: Having the ability to run explain on queries containing placeholders.That makes life so much easier.
- Which PostgreSQL extension do you benefit from most, and why?
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pg_stat_statements. Definitely. It is most useful to debug performance problems.