Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano | Working on Postgres after 13 years on SQL Server with Panagiotis Antonopoulos

menu

close

What happens when a database engineer spends 13 years on SQL Server and then starts working on Postgres? In Episode 41 of Talking Postgres, Distinguished Engineer Panagiotis “Panos” Antonopoulos of Microsoft joins Claire to share what surprised him most about making that transition. We explore why Postgres felt familiar from the start—and what shocked Panos about the clean and lean Postgres codebase. We also dig into how public mailing lists and AI can help explain why design decisions were made, why more people are asking “why not Postgres?”, and the shared-storage architecture behind Azure HorizonDB.

Previously on Talking Postgres:<br>Talking Postgres Ep 39: From MemSQL to HorizonDB, an engineer's journey with Adam Prout<br>Talking Postgres Ep 38: How I went from Oracle to Postgres (with a big NoSQL detour) with Gwen Shapira<br>Talking Postgres Ep 40: How I got started running a Postgres user group with Jeremy Schneider<br>Links mentioned in this episode:<br>SIGMOD: ACM SIGMOD-PODS Conference 2027<br>CMUDB talk: HorizonDB: Co-Designing Postgres and Azure for Cloud-Native OLTP, by Adam Prout<br>PostgreSQL mailing list: pgsql-hackers<br>PostgreSQL docs: pg_stat_slru (simple least-recently-used)<br>Docs: Azure HorizonDB<br>Poster: Postgres Happiness Hints

Creators and Guests

Host

Claire Giordano

Head of open source community efforts for Postgres at Microsoft. Ex-Citus Data, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and Brown University CS. Serves on PGCA board. Prolific Postgres conference speaker. Co-creator of POSETTE: An Event for Postgres. Loves sailing in Greece.

LinkedIn

Mastodon

Bluesky

GitHub

Producer

Aaron Wislang

Open Source Engineering + Developer Relations at Microsoft + Azure ☁️ | Go (golang), Cloud Native, Linux 🐧 🐍 🦀 ☕ 🍷📷 🎹 | Toronto 🇨🇦🌎 | 💨😷💉 | https://aaronw.dev/hello/

LinkedIn

Mastodon

Threads

Bluesky

GitHub

Website Link

Guest

Panagiotis Antonopoulos

Distinguished Engineer & VP at Microsoft

LinkedIn

headphones

Listen Anywhere

More Options "

Postgres, PostgreSQL and the Slonik Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada, and used with their permission.

© 2026 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Broadcast by

transistor logo

rewind

fast forward