🍿 Listen to the podcast episode 🍿 about “My journey into performance benchmarking” with Jelte & Marco.
Update in July 2024: Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the 16 podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found at TalkingPostgres.com. Read more about the podcast rename to Talking Postgres.
Episode 11 of Path To Citus Con—the monthly podcast for developers who love Postgres—is now out. This episode featured guests Jelte Fennema-Nio and Marco Slot who joined us (along with co-hosts Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia) to talk about performance benchmarking, specifically benchmarking databases and Postgres.
The official title of Episode 11 with Jelte and Marco is “My Journey into Performance Benchmarking”.
I love hearing how people find themselves doing what they do, so it was fascinating to hear how they got started. One of the most interesting insights was the impact something like benchmarking can have on your career—even if you don’t particularly enjoy it!
This episode was also packed with benchmarking tools and techniques you can pick up and use today—take a peek at some of the resources in the show notes for this episode—along with helpful insights resulting from Jelte’s and Marco’s years of combined experience in the space.
And once you have the data, how do you answer the right questions, or tell the story effectively? Perhaps, like Marco, you’re also a fan of flame graphs. Or you haven’t used flame graphs yet but are about to discover a new favorite thing. Measuring things can be fun! The tooling continues to span tried-and-true Linux tools to fast-moving technology such as eBPF.
Not a database benchmarking fan, yet? I’m willing to bet you’ll come away with a fresh perspective on how impactful it can be, as well as some ideas on how you can apply benchmarking to your own workflows at the right moment.
These insights are broadly applicable and extend beyond Postgres, too. I found myself reflecting on the time I’ve spent hacking on similar efforts in the Linux & Cloud Native world, and how I can import some of these ideas into application workloads.
This was Marco’s second time on the podcast, after kicking off our very first episode alongside Simon Willison with Working in public on open source. And Jelte was a speaker at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres last year discussing Postgres without SQL: Natural language queries using GPT-3 & Rust. After this excellent deep-dive into benchmarking Postgres, I’m hoping Jelte and Marco will join us again on the podcast in the future!
Where to find Path To Citus Con podcast episodes (and transcripts)
You can listen to this podcast episode on almost every podcast platform! You can also find the show notes online for My Journey into Postgres Benchmarking with Jelte and Marco—plus also the written transcript.
Our next podcast episode (Ep12!) will be recorded live:
- Where: Microsoft Open Source Discord
- When: Wed Feb 07 @ 10am PST | 1pm EST | 6pm UTC
- Guest: with the amazing Derk van Veen, to talk about
- Topic: from developer to PostgreSQL specialist
- Calendar invite: Mark your calendar to participate in the live text chat that happens in parallel to the live recording (we’re huge fans of social audio on Discord). All the instructions for joining the live show are in the cal invite.
You may have seen Derk talk about his Postgres work at Adyen on the PG conference circuit—he’s a brilliant speaker, and this promises to be a challenging conversation!
You can find all the past episodes for the Path To Citus Con podcast on:
More useful links:
- Index of all past Path To Citus Con episodes
- Subscribe to the calendar to know when all the future shows are coming up here.
We hope you enjoy the episodes of the Path To Citus Con podcast as much as we enjoy creating them. If you do, please share with friends and the database community, and perhaps join us live for our next episode. You might even be our next guest! Rating and reviewing us on your favorite podcasting platform will also help others discover it.
[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the 16 podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found at TalkingPostgres.com.
