Interview with Red Gate Software Limited
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not neccessarily represent those of the PGDay UK 2023 organisation, 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?
Many of the enterprise customers that we serve are experiencing a change in the topology of their database architectures. Gone are the days where one database served every need, and instead, companies are searching to find the best fit for a given project and anticipated ROI. In many of those cases, we see PostgreSQL as a go-to database for greenfield projects and application migrations, alike.
As companies expand their database landscapes, they need tools that help them deliver consistent value to their users across multiple database platforms. That's where Redgate can help.
Through tools like Flyway, we help development teams efficiently manage database migrations across the entire development pipeline. With SQL Monitor, we provide a best-in-class database monitoring solution with alerting, historical server statistics, and query metrics over time. And finally, our entire suite of test data management tools helps teams quickly and easily test and secure data at any scale.
What is your PostgreSQL centered product?
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, can generating consistent migration scripts as you develop, and also solve a myriad of common issues in your deployment pipeline.
And more recently, our other products for monitoring your database landscape and providing easy test data management and provisioning have expanded to include support for PostgreSQL as well.
What is your company’s mission?
Redgate makes software to help companies and professionals get the most out of their databases (our heritage and primary focus is the Microsoft ecosystem). We engineer our products and business to work for the mass market, which gives us the freedom to work on what everyone needs, not what an individual wants. We succeed by reliably solving our customers' problems with ingeniously simple software.
Which of your company’s contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference) are you most proud of?
One thing Redgate has valued for nearly 25 years in the database communities that we serve is building community. Through educational content, sponsoring events, hosting community meetups, and more, we thrive to see data professionals advance in their skills and improve their ability to deliver consistent value at the database layer.
As we continue to do more in our products to support PostgreSQL developers and DBAs, we're excited to be present at conferences and events that support this community.
What feature in the last PostgreSQL version benefits your company most?
In the upcoming PostgreSQL 16 release, 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 huge amount of effort that Melanie Plageman and others put into the pg_stat_io view, along with continues 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?
Two things come to mind with regard to 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.