Data Bene

Postgres Café: Contributing to Open Source

The title (Postgres Café: Contributing to Open Source) with aesthetic elements like an arrow, lightbulb, and emphasis.

It’s our sixth episode of Postgres Café, a collaborative podcast from Data Bene & Xata where we discuss everything from PostgreSQL extensions to community contributions. In today’s episode, Sarah Conway & Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek meet with Andrea Cucciniello on the topic of how companies and individuals can contribute to open source projects, and why they might consider doing so.

Episode 6: PostgreSQL Extension Development, The Community, & Beyond

How often do companies express interest in open-source contribution? Clearly, by helping out in any way, the open-source project itself sees a benefit. But are there any advantages for the company that is giving back in any way? What are some contribution methods that a company can consider? These are all questions we hear about constantly—so let’s explore some of the answers discussed in this episode in a quick recap.

Giving back to open source projects & communities

At Data Bene, we have a few customers that are interested in developing features or enhancements for the PostgreSQL ecosystem already.

These companies are interested in addressing bugs and adding new features that complement their use cases and tech stacks across PostgreSQL, Citus Data, and related technologies to accomplish two things:

  1. To build functionality they need that is natively built into the upstream software and transparently maintained by the greater open-source community, and
  2. To ensure others who have a similar use case are able to leverage these benefits as well.

Times change; the only way the upstream software will remain relevant, useful, and beneficial to the global audience using the product is if there are global contributions back to the same, ensuring it still meets real users needs from year to year.

Why support open-source projects?

Vendor lock-in is a huge problem in the software & services industry; giving back to open-source projects ensures that technology that is openly developed can continue to be so. Using FOSS technology means you avoid investing in a company that might close the code or restrict access, giving the end user freedom to continue using and developing essential tools that are part of their tech stack.

This kind of software is also subject to a highly visible development process, meaning it is much harder for privacy invasions, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and more to be built into the underlying code.

Additionally, open-source software is built by individuals all over the world with a variety of perspectives and backgrounds; this ensures that it is thoroughly tested, with a wide range of features built-in that are actually useful to many end-users. This helps these kinds of projects to be successful for a number of years and continue to be so as long as there is a community willing to support each of them.

Case-in-point: PostgreSQL has been around for 35+ years of active development and is still topping developer surveys and charts today for being the most liked, most used, and most popular database solution—worldwide!

How can companies best support open-source projects?

There are a few key ways to achieve this end-goal:

  1. Include code contributions as part of your engineers’ working time. When allocating developer time for working on upstream code, you’re ensuring that the technology that you leverage (to provide support and/or services, to power your product, or for your infrastructure to depend on) experiences improved performance, expanded functionality, resolved issues, or addressed bug fixes.
  2. Consider developing extensions. Creating and maintaining extensions allow companies to add specialized features or address certain use cases without altering the core codebase. In the case of PostgreSQL in particular, this extensibility allows Postgres to meet the needs of different industries, users, and businesses, with a versatile and strong ecosystem. This kind of modular system lets PostgreSQL evolve without an overcomplicated core, making the project as a whole easier to manage and update.
  3. Sponsor, organize, and participate in events. As a company, you can elect to uplift or initiate technology conferences, user-groups, workshops, and more to spread awareness and educate the general public about the technology you want to see thrive. Events are an excellent way for users & developers to collaborate, discuss advancements, and share best practices, which leads to a strengthened community and an enhanced product as a result.

How Data Bene contributes

Cédric Villemain, Data Bene’s president, has developed pg_fincore and is currently working on StatsMgr, pg_psi, and other components that are designed to improve Postgres’ statistics capabilities.

Our team is also responsible for a number of contributions across projects like Citus Data and Zammad.

We make a point of sponsoring, presenting at, & advocating for PostgreSQL or open-source community conferences and user groups, such as PostgreSQL Europe, pgDay Paris, AlpOSS, Capitole du Libre, & more. Some of our team also individually have started or are on the organizational committees for various events such as the Barcelona & Madrid PostgreSQL User Groups and pgDay Lowlands. The impact of events on the larger project & community cannot be understated, and it is important to us to do all we can to contribute in this manner.

Finally, we help customers understand how to contribute to PostgreSQL and similar open-source projects. Through training, workshops, and collaboration, we encourage making meaningful contributions that fit their goals and support the greater community.

If you’re a developer who is interested in contributing to open-source and/or the PostgreSQL ecosystem, or helping customers with R&D requirements, our team is expanding—visit us at our website to see available positions!

Watch the full episode

Thinking about watching the full discussion? Check it out on YouTube:

Stay tuned for more Postgres tools

We’ve finished our first round of episodes for Postgres Café as of this release! More episodes may or may not be pending… follow us on social media (like LinkedIn or Mastodon) to be updated on more to come. (Would you like to see more from this podcast series? Let us know!)

Subscribe to the playlist or check it out for interviews about open-source extensions like StatsMgr for efficient statistics management for PostgreSQL, an open-source change data capture (CDC) tool designed specifically for PostgreSQL called pgstream, & more. PostgreSQL is one of the most extensible databases on the market with a huge extension ecosystem; learn directly from the experts as you discover some of the options out there.