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

I live in Brittany, France and work as a Database System Engineer for OVHcloud. My wife, daughters and I live in a house in the countryside with our cats (official and otherwise).

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

Running is life. I run at least 3 times a week, up to the Marathon distance (42,2km). I’m an adept of barefoot or minimalist shoes. Playing music is another of my favorite activities. I play several musical instruments (guitar, bass, drums, piano). A more recent activity is model making (building model boats), following in my father’s footsteps, some would say.

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

Never been a big fan of social networking, even though I worked for a major French social media for many years in my previous company.

• Linkedin profile
• DBA StackExchange profile
• Github profile

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

Among the latest books I’ve read, “The Terror” by Dan Simmons, which tells the story of 2 British ships in 1845, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, which were trying to find a Northwest Passage over the top of Canada to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Prisoners of the ice for several years, the 2 crews perished and the ships were only found very recently (in 2014!). Actually, I’m building a model of the HMS Terror (slowly but surely).

Any favorite movie, or show?

I love Rock Musicals like “Tommy” (The Who), Brian de Palma’s “Phantom of the Paradise” or the cult classic “Rocky Horror Picture Show”.

What does your ideal weekend look like?

A mix of physical and mental activities. Sport (usually running), playing music, spending some time improving my websites or learning about new computer technology.

What’s still on your bucket list?

I’m always curious to learn or try out new things, in lots of different areas.

What is the best advice you ever got?

In any learning curve, no matter what the subject, there will come a time when you feel like you’re not making any progress and you’ll be tempted to give up. Stick with it, it’ll pay off in the end!

When did you start using PostgreSQL, and why?

​​I started using PostgreSQL as a web developer in 2005, when I joined my previous company. During the 15 years I spent there, my job gradually evolved from developer to DBA (yes, that’s what it was called back then).

Do you remember which version of PostgreSQL you started with?

I started with PostgreSQL 8.1, but we quickly moved on to 8.2. We actually stayed with this version for (too) long before I took over responsibility for the databases and made the major upgrades more regularly. I remember the significant performance improvement brought by the 8.3 update. But these versions seem so old now.

Have you studied at a university? If yes, was it related to computers? Did your study help you with your current job?

I started learning programming at university with Scheme (Lisp) for the first few years, then Pascal, C, Java and more. It gave me a solid grounding in algorithmics but IT is evolving so rapidly that most of my knowledge has been acquired through professional projects or personal work at home.

What other databases are you using? Which one is your favorite?

Also using MySQL (Percona Server distribution) and MariaDB. But PostgreSQL is definitely my favorite. It’s so robust, efficient, bug-free (compared to those I mentioned previously), feature-rich and well documented.

On which PostgreSQL-related projects are you currently working?

I’m currently working on setting up Change Data Capture (aka CDC) with Debezium and Kafka Connect to stream PostgreSQL (among others) database changes in real-time into Kafka topics for Business Intelligence (BI) projects.

What is your favorite PostgreSQL extension?

PostgreSQL extensions is a really cool plug-and-play feature to extend functionality.

I remember using fuzzystrmatch a long time ago. I created a search engine for a Social Network based on Soundex and Levenshtein distance to match searches on the phonetics of people’s names (there are better tools for that nowadays but it did the job back then).

Other extensions I’ve used include PostGIS, TimescaleDB, pgcrypto, amcheck, citext, unaccent…

What is the feature you like most in the latest PostgreSQL version?

One of the most interesting features in the latest PostgreSQL 16 release is the ability to set up logical replication on standby instances. Particularly useful for the CDC project I’m working on, as it allows you to connect to a replica rather than the primary.

Adding to that, what feature/mechanism would you like to see in PostgreSQL? And why?

I would definitely like to see the HAProxy Proxy Protocol implemented in PostgreSQL. When using a proxy (like HAProxy) to manage client connections to a PostgreSQL server/cluster, this allows PostgreSQL to manage and display the real client IP instead of the proxy’s IP address.

This makes it possible to set up a fine-grained pg_hba config and improve auditing and debugging.

Should PostgreSQL have built-in multi-master replication?

Never needed multi-master replication.

Could you describe your PostgreSQL development toolbox?

I generally prefer using a command line tool rather than a Graphic User Interface client. psql is really nice. For editing SQL files, I use Visual Studio Code. Docker is useful for quickly testing things.

Which skills are a must have for a PostgreSQL developer/user?

PostgreSQL is quite easy to use, configure and manage. Of course SQL basics are required for any PostgreSQL user. You must understand the host-based configuration file (aka pg_hba).

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

I often attend PGDay France events. I have sometimes visited PGConf.EU.

Do you think PostgreSQL has a high entry barrier?

As a user, absolutely not. Documentation is complete, clear and well done. Thanks to PGDG, up-to-date packages are available on the major systems and installation is easy. Libraries are maintained for many languages.

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

PostgreSQL has evolved over the years, adapting to user needs and new uses. Its release strategy is clear and regular. There’s no doubt that PostgreSQL will be the benchmark RDBMS for a long time to come.

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

PostgreSQL is suited for large and complex business applications as well as small personal projects.

What is your opinion on ORMs?

Application developers like abstraction. For some simple usages, simple filtering, it makes the job. But in doing so, developers are missing out on a number of advanced features (window functions, CTEs, …).

SQL versus NoSQL databases?

Both address different use cases. They should not be in competition with each other. They are complementary.

Which other Open Source projects are you involved or interested in?

Ansible is a great tool that I use a lot for managing PostgreSQL clusters (cluster setup, database deployments, migrations and more). Written in Python, this makes the contributions accessible. It is evolving fast and offers a wide range of modules and collections to manage just about anything (including PostgreSQL databases of course…).