Please tell us about yourself, and where you are from.

I live in Normandy, France. I’m sure you know the place since it is where “D-Day - 6th june 1944 The battle of Normandy in France” took place.

I had the chance to grow up with a Vetrex console, an Amstrad CPC computer, then a Commodore Amiga in the mid 80’s being a teenager. I started coding in assembly on Zilog 80, then on Motorola 68000 when I was 14. You have to keep in mind there was no Internet or people helping you to acquire knowledge but it was fun to understand everything on our own. I finished being a demo maker on the Amiga.

I loved the rigorous and creative thinking we had to develop, to overcome the impossible (for the younger audience, demos consisted in doing incredible and impossible things regarding the hardware we had at our disposal). I had written assembly code for 10 years on a daily basis which I miss a lot too. For the record, I hate Intel x86 assembly so much I do not intend to write any assembly code on x86.

So logically speaking, when I see modern inefficient processing or poor algorithm usage, I feel very sad… And I see a lot of these things these days.

Most of the time, I’m easy going. I like brain teasers and dark humour (you may hear me saying horrific things, but it is just playing with words and concepts, not trying to offend people, so do not take it to heart).

How do you spend your free time? What are your hobbies?

I try to spend some quality time with the family at home or outside (biking, walking, hiking).

I introduced my 11 year old son to 80’s and 90’s arcade games. It was a success.

Next targets are Unreal Tournament 4 (invasion mode and PvP) and Quake 3. Prepare yourself my dear son, you will die a lot :)

Any exercises you do regularly?

I stopped practicing regular physical activities since the COVID lockdown.

I try to engage myself back on the rail of sweating. I’m not at my best but I’m trying to keep a regular activity.

Any Social Media channels of yours we should be aware of?

I created a LinkedIn account some years ago. I’m not active on social media channels, including my LinkedIn pages. I really don’t care. If I don’t accept your invitation on LinkedIn do not feel offended, it’s not you, it’s me. Well - sometimes it’s you. When you ask people to connect with you, you can at least say “hello” and explain why that person should connect with you, no? Regarding social media channels, I don’t feel the urge to share my undoubtedly brilliant thinking to the masses, making me the one-eyed man king in the country of the blind (at best).

I wrote some blog articles for the Data Bene website, you may have a look.

If you don’t find them, try a bit later because we are refactoring our blog section.

Are you known by a nickname in the community? If yes, what’s the history?

Not one I’m aware of :)

PS: I don’t need one so stop suggesting it.

Last book you read? Or a book you want to recommend to readers?

My last two books were “The Undercover Economist Strikes Back” from Tim Harford and “Mindfuck (Cambridge Analytica)” from Christopher Wylie. Both books could be reduced to 40 pages each instead of 300 and 500 boring pages… I hate these kinds of books where you lose your time reading them.

I have a book on my shelf which explains the colonization operated by France over other territories and people over time. I’m waiting to have plenty of time to read it.

Favorite movie, or show?

I don’t have one that’s a favorite over others, but I do have a set of several. “The good, the bad and the ugly”, “Once upon a time in the west” , “Dune (1984)” and “Les tontons flingueurs (french movie)”.

If you want to know why I chose these ones, you’ll have to ask when meeting me in real life.

What does your ideal weekend look like?

It’s a bit cliché but I like spending time with the family hiking or pulling an all-nighter to make big advancement over my projects or finding a solution to a problem (brain teaser, math problem, algorithm, testing a new idea…).

What’s still on your bucket list?

Improving myself over too many things.

When did you start using PostgreSQL, and why?

In 2006, I started a new job in Telecoms. PostgreSQL 7.2 was in use for our customers and we had PostgreSQL 6.5 for building reports over Business Objects. I have been working with PostgreSQL every working day since that time.

Have you studied at a university?

I studied at University in Caen from where I have a master in electronics and signal processing and another master in computer science.

Did your study help you with your current job?

I can’t imagine myself not being a scientist. My education provided me with the tools to think rationally to cope with the unknown which is definitively an advantage as a consultant.

In my opinion, having a solid education in science should be highly recommended because it helps people be rational. Being able to prove when someone is trying to cheat you with fallacies or data manipulation… It can be life saving.

On which PostgreSQL-related projects are you currently working?

I started working on pg_diskio a few years ago. The goal is to show how PostgreSQL behaves focusing on IOs and internal processes. It works but I have not published it yet. I want to add some features and refactor the code before publishing.

I have another project you may find unrelated to PostgreSQL (you’re half right, half wrong :)). It is used to display what perf collected. While “perf sched” results can be scripted, visualizing the result is a nightmare. Since the result is very interesting and I have not found a usable tool for visualization, I’m making my own.

How do you contribute to PostgreSQL?

Too poorly till now().

I’m interested in improving PostgreSQL in NUMA and vectorized IO.

Any contributions to PostgreSQL which do not involve writing code?

For what it’s worth, I gave talks at PGDay France for 3 years.

My goal is to provide talks in a different way other people do and/or speak about topics almost nobody covers.

For instance I spoke about the dimensioning rules for PostgreSQL, an implementation of transparent data encryption using new data types, how checkpoint IOs are regulated and about the frontend/backend protocol extending to connection poolers.

What is the most annoying PostgreSQL thing you can think of? And any chance to fix it?

I see a few ones:

1. The fact there are people talking about a PostgreSQL community version implying PostgreSQL is a degraded version of something else. There is no community version, there is PostgreSQL and some forks which are not PostgreSQL. Please stop misleading people with your wording implying PostgreSQL is a degraded version of your company work. I’m not saying the fork is not better than PostgreSQL, I’m saying it is something else.

2. NUMA performance or PostgreSQL behaviour when NUMA is active. Companies buy large multi-socket servers thinking more CPU (sockets) is better. I expect a lot from Andres Freund’s work on this topic.

3. It’s not a PostgreSQL issue per se but it is related: there are companies where PostgreSQL is the central node of the system. It is so important that if PostgreSQL goes down the company is paralyzed. I’m surprised these companies do not include PostgreSQL in their CI/CD chain tooling (build farms, regression testing…)

Which PostgreSQL conferences do you visit? Do you submit talks?

I visit and submit talks to PG Day France and pgDay Paris.

I have visited only PGConf.EU, and this year I did a training session in Athens.

Do you think PostgreSQL has a high entry barrier?

No, basics are easily acquired.

psql is very simple to use.

PostgreSQL’s source code is rather easy to read.

I forgot to mention also that the documentation is useful.

Do you think PostgreSQL will be here for many years in the future?

Maybe the biggest challenge will be to successfully replace people like Tom Lane when they will stop working on PostgreSQL.

Would you recommend PostgreSQL for business, or for side projects?

In my opinion, PostgreSQL is rock solid and works just fine for most projects. Nevertheless, it is not perfect. There are some areas where it does not shine like the ability to achieve true multi-master.

What is your opinion on ORMs?

As a consultant we usually hear about ORM when things go wrong. But I heard people being happy with their ORM and they say: you have to invest some time to understand how it works…

I’m not an ORM specialist but I believe devs have to understand their tools.

SQL versus NoSQL databases?

Why versus? You can have PostgreSQL (data) + Redis (cache) for instance.

Anyway, RDBMS or other DBMS are used for their specific strengths and application needs according to the use case. If you need ACID, concurrency and SQL use RDBMS, else use whatever makes sense for your project.