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

My name is Vasilis Ventirozos. I’m from Athens - Greece. I am 44 years old. A homeworker since 2013, a PostgreSQL DBA and performance engineer since simpler times.

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

I like driving things that go fast. I currently own a Ducati V4, and for the last 2 years I have been obsessed with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I train 4 times a week, probably the hardest thing I have ever done.

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

I used to have a blog that I wrote pretty regularly but either because of time restrictions or because I think that Postgres blogs are a bit overpopulated I have stopped. So currently no.

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

I use the nickname Evol Monkey, it’s basically the name of my consulting company, the story behind it would show my cynic nature so I won’t go into details 🙂

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

Postgres related:

• PostgreSQL Query Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Building Efficient Queries

Non Postgres related but not completely irrelevant:

• The book of 5 rings by Miyamoto Musashi
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Favorite movie, or show?

The pianist by Roman Polansky

Old Boy .. the Korean version.. obviously :)

Best music, best song?

Rap, old punk rock (NOFX , pennywise) and generally 90’s music

Best food?

I’m almost strictly a carnivore so apart from that, I love pizza and burgers

Best drink? Non-alcoholic or alcoholic?

I don’t really like alcohol but once a year I’ll enjoy an 18 year Lagavulin.

Other than that, double espresso!!

What does your ideal weekend look like?

A ride with my bike, jiu jitsu training, and spending time with my wife, son and/or some friends sounds ideal.

What’s still on your bucket list?

Lots and lots of things, but a black belt in jiuj itsu and a trip to Japan is the first thing that comes to mind.

What is the best advice you ever got?

Do what you hate like you love it and you’ll succeed at everything.

When did you start using PostgreSQL, and why?

I started using Postgres in the early 2000’s (I think it was 2001). I was working for a telco and we were looking into replacing an illegal copy of Informix. We tried MySQL, which was the newest and hottest, but after a corruption because of file system limitations (I think it was ext1) I threw it out of the window and tried Postgres. Never looked back.

Do you remember which version of PostgreSQL you started with?

It was 7.x. I can’t remember the exact version

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

I was never too good at school but I loved computers since the age of 8 (started with a 8088 running DOS 3.30) then, at 1997 I got into Linux (Slackware, 2.0.30 kernel)

When it comes to databases I am self taught. I kind of regret that I didn’t study at a university. It would probably make things much easier.

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

I have worked with many databases, I even was an Oracle dba for a while but I realized that all you need is Postgres ;)

On which PostgreSQL-related projects are you currently working?

I have been working on and off on a number of personal projects, I usually don’t release them and if I do, I don’t even tweet about them because I don’t think they are useful to others. but I’m probably wrong and I should reconsider. I am currently working on a High availability “lab” that I personally find very useful for experimentation, but I doubt anyone would need it.

How do you contribute to PostgreSQL?

I’m trying to help people in the Postgres Slack when I have time, and I also want to participate in patch/ feature testing, but I always procrastinate. I had previous involvements in partman, omnipitr and others and generally I advocate Postgres whenever I can.

What is your favorite PostgreSQL extension?

I use a lot, and I find myself using more, but the ones that I can’t live without are the ones below.

Some of these are part of my toolset and some of them are used for when bad things happen.

If I had to pick one it would be pg_stat_statements that I personally use all the time, either for ad-hoc queries or by keeping snapshots of the data over time for later comparisons.

• pg_stat_statements (should be in core in my opinion)
• pg_buffercache
• pageinspect
• pg_prewarm
• pg_surgery
• amcheck

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

It’s probably Vacuum on high write OLTP applications. Also the fact that some .0 releases proved to be problematic or buggy (10.0 when parallelism was introduced, 13.0 when index deduplication was introduced). I guess better testing, pushing our clients to move development environments into beta versions would help a lot.

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

Logical replication from a standby seems very useful, even if I haven’t used it in production yet.

And the introduction of pg_stat_io that gives us system wide IO stats that were nearly impossible to get before.

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

Actually what I want to see in Postgres is not a feature. Let me explain, I used to encourage people to migrate to the latest major version the moment it was released. Because of some unfortunate releases I changed my mind and nowadays I tell clients to wait till the .1 version to upgrade. So better testing (from all of us), slower and more surefooted steps on development.

Should PostgreSQL have a built-in connection pooler?

Postgres is an RDBMS, let’s stick to that, make the perfect planner, executioner and storage layer and let the community build the tooling around that, including connection poolers, automatic management of HA, backups and more. The development resources are limited and in my personal opinion they should be concentrated in quality over everything else.

Should PostgreSQL have built-in multi-master replication?

Those who ask for MMR probably don’t need it or they haven’t used a similar solution.

I have worked with MMR in Oracle and I know very well what conflict resolution means. So probably no.

Could you describe your PostgreSQL development toolbox?

My work usually takes place on a remote server over ssh so I learned how to work with little to none, vim, psql and system monitoring and tracing tools is all I (usually) need.

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

I think the skills for everyone who is in the IT business are more or less the same.

Troubleshooting skills, patience and the will to always learn are a good start.

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

I am socially awkward so I don’t really go to conferences. That said PGConf.EU will happen in Greece so I feel obligated to submit a talk. Any good suggestion on an interesting topic would be very welcome. 😛

Do you think PostgreSQL has a high entry barrier?

No, the opposite actually, Postgres is the easiest enterprise grade database to install and start working with, the defaults of postgresql.conf are good enough for probably 90% of the installations, especially in the development phase. The documentation is really good compared to others (im talking about you Oracle) and the community is super helpful. Also the SQL is pretty close to the standard, which helps a lot with writing software for Postgres.

What is your advice for people who want to start PostgreSQL developing - as in, contributing to the project. Where and how should they start?

Ask questions, learn how things work on a deep level, be thankful and once you get proficient try to help others in any way you can, don’t become a diva.

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

I can’t say how many years RDBMS has as a technology, many have tried to predict that and failed (remember mongo), but I am willing to bet that Postgres will be the last RDBMS to die.

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

Working for more than one consulting firm gave me the opportunity to work and manage a lot of mission critical databases, more than 100 production systems, big or small in size. Postgres has proven that it’s so flexible that even by doing dumb things, Postgres can probably handle it.

Are you reading the -hackers mailinglist? Any other list?

I am following all postgres mailing lists. Do I read all emails ? Unfortunately no.

What is your opinion on ORMs?

As most of the people that work on performance and Postgres I don’t really love them but I understand the appeal of ORMs to developers, especially those who don’t like writing (quality) SQL or relational modeling but performance doesn’t come easy.

SQL versus NoSQL databases?

Is this still a thing?

What other places do you hang out?

You can find me in Postgres Slack as evolmonkey

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

While only involved as a user I am interested and I support openBSD, openZFS and ROS (as a hobbyist).

Anything else you like to add?

At the time of writing Simon Riggs passed away in a terrible accident, I would like to give my condolences to his loved ones.