Interviews

Muffy Barkocy

1. How did you first get involved with PostgreSQL?

   I first encountered it in the 1980s, a friend of mine was working on the project at UCB with Professor Stonebraker, and then I was working at Informix in the late 90s when he was CTO. However, it wasn't until almost 30 years later, when I started work at Instacart in 2015, that I used Postgres professionally.

2. How did you get interested in the area that is the subject of your talk?

   Two years ago I moved to the Infrastructure team at Instacart and was given the task of learning Terraform and then using it to configure all of our resources. I started with the RDS instances, as I had a fair amount of experience with databases.

3. What is one feature of PostgreSQL that more people should use?

   Common Table Expressions. I've been writing SQL for over 30 years and they've made an amazing difference for me when writing complex queries.

4. What future area of PostgreSQL development are you most excited about?

   Improvements and additions to datatypes.

5. Anything else you'd like to tell us about yourself or PostgreSQL?

   In the 80s and 90s I worked on a natural language interface to relational databases and then I worked at Informix on their database interface GUI, then I worked for several web companies using a variety of database engines including Oracle and MySQL, so I've had a lot of interactions with relational databases. Of all of those, Postgres has been my favorite database engine to work with.