Interview with Redgate
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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Our enterprise customers are experiencing a change in their database architecture topologies. One database can no longer serve every need, instead, companies are searching for the best fit for a given project and anticipated ROI. In many cases, we see PostgreSQL as a go-to database for greenfield projects and application migrations alike. When database landscapes expand, companies need tools to deliver consistent value to users across multiple database platforms. That's where Redgate can help with its end-to-end database DevOps solutions.
With tools like Flyway, development teams can efficiently manage database migrations across the entire development pipeline. SQL Monitor provides a best-in-class database monitoring solution with alerting, historical server statistics, and query metrics over time.
Our newly launched Redgate Test Data Manager product simplifies the challenges that come with Test Data Management (TDM) and modern software development across multiple databases. Organizations are enabled to introduce reliable and compliant test data delivery to development processes, improving the quality of releases and reducing risk, while slotting seamlessly into existing workflows.
- What is your PostgreSQL centered product and what makes it unique?
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The tool that most people know, including many in the PostgreSQL community, is Flyway, an advanced schema migration application that can be used across more than 20 databases. Advanced features in Flyway Teams and Enterprise allow teams of developers to work with their PostgreSQL database as code. Flyway maintains a schema model of your database with each commit, generating consistent migration scripts as you develop, and also solve a myriad of common issues in your deployment pipeline.
As you might expect, our other products for monitoring your database landscape have expanded to include support for PostgreSQL as well, with PostgreSQL supported at launch by Redgate Test Data Manager for easy test data management and provisioning.
- What makes your company a great place to work?
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Redgate makes ingeniously simple software that helps teams get the most value out of any database, on any platform, anywhere, and our company ethos is to focus on collaborative teams who engineer our products to reliably solve our customers’ problems. That’s one of our values – when our customers succeed, so do we. We recruit carefully to build a diverse, highly talented company of people all working together to achieve our goals of supporting the database community and helping IT professionals unlock value from their data. Our people work together in teams to make life easier for IT leaders, development and operations teams, increasing efficiency, reducing errors and protecting business-critical data. Check out our careers page for current opportunities!
- What feature in the last PostgreSQL version benefits your company most?
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In PostgreSQL 16, two things come to mind.
First, the continued work on predefined roles helps our clients more easily configure their PostgreSQL cluster with the right privileges so that tooling like Flyway and SQL Monitor can work effectively, but safely.
Second, the efforts by man contributors to release the pg_stat_io view, along with continued enhancements to other commonly used metric views, will help us provide an improved user experience in tools like SQL Monitor. The PostgreSQL community continues to make exciting changes that help developers and DBAs work as efficiently as possible while maintaining and troubleshooting their PostgreSQL clusters.
- Which PostgreSQL extension do you benefit from most, and why?
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Two things come to mind regarding PostgreSQL extensions.
First, managing extensions and extension versions is an important part of having consistent deployments with any PostgreSQL-backed application. Flyway Teams and Enterprise track extension versions and maintain this information in the schema model, ensuring that all schema comparison and script generation validate that the right extension is being used across your development pipeline.
Second, SQL Monitor relies on the venerable pg_stat_statements extension, among others, to help customers visualize and track the performance of application queries over time. By consistently sampling this data over time, SQL Monitor helps clients quickly zero in on issues with their PostgreSQL clusters, saving valuable time in database management.