u/clairegiordano

For all of you who work on databases or systems code, this episode might be interesting. I had Adam Prout (distinguished engineer at Microsoft, founding architect of Azure HorizonDB) on the Talking Postgres podcast to walk through his path from MemSQL to HorizonDB—and what changed along the way.

Some of the ideas we covered:

• Shared-storage architecture shifts where a lot of the work lives
• Replication, durability, backups → pushed into the storage layer
• Choosing Rust: a large class of bugs just won’t compile
• “Good systems programming” = being very paranoid about what can go wrong
• Why working on databases exposes you to so many parts of computer science
• Startup vs big company tradeoffs as an engineer

There’s also an interesting thread about trying to make Postgres and Azure “fit together cleanly” like puzzle pieces.

If you’re curious, episode with audio + transcript is here: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/from-memsql-to-horizondb-an-engineers-journey-with-adam-prout

There’s a YouTube version too if that’s easier: https://youtu.be/dsyWz6tcfh0?si=kTMD1eTamlVneVXN

Happy to discuss—& always open to suggestions about future episode guests or topics.