Database School

Hunter Leath, CEO of Archil, explains how they’re building a “universal storage engine” that sits between your apps and S3—making an S3 bucket behave like a fast, POSIX-compatible disk for containers, servers, and even Lambda. Along the way, we dig into how their SSD-backed clusters and custom protocol avoid the usual small-file pain and where this approach shines (and where it doesn’t).Follow...

Hammad Bashir, CTO of Chroma, joins the show to break down how modern vector search systems are actually built from local, embedded databases to massively distributed, object-storage-backed architectures. We dig into Chroma’s shared local-to-cloud API, log-structured storage on object stores, hybrid search, and why retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) isn’t going anywhere.Follow Hammad:Twitter/X:...

In this episode of Database School, Aaron Francis sits down with Jordan Tigani, co-founder and CEO of MotherDuck, to break down what DuckDB is, how MotherDuck hosts it in the cloud, and why analytics workloads are shifting toward embedded databases. They dig into Duck Lake, pricing models, scaling strategies, and what it really takes to build a modern cloud data warehouse.Follow Jordan:Twitter/X:...

In this episode, Aaron talks with Dennis Magda, author of Just Use Postgres!, about the wide world of modern Postgres, from JSON and full-text search to generative AI, time-series storage, and even message queues. They explore when Postgres should be your go-to tool, when it shouldn’t, and why understanding its breadth helps developers build better systems.Use the code DBSmagda to get 45% off...

In this episode, Gajus Kuizinas, co-founder and CTO of Contra, joins Aaron to talk about building the engineering world you want to live in, from strict runtime-validated SQL with Slonik to creating high-ownership engineering cultures. They dive into developer experience, runtime assertions, SafeQL, and even “Loom-driven development,” a powerful review process that lets teams move fast without...

In this episode, Aaron Francis talks with Simon Eskildsen, co-founder and CEO of TurboPuffer, about building a high-performance search engine and database that runs entirely on object storage. They dive deep on Simon's time as an engineer at Shopify, database design trade-offs, and how TurboPuffer powers modern AI workloads like Cursor and Notion.Follow Simon:Twitter:...

Aaron talks with Ovais Tariq, co-founder and CEO of Tigris Data and former Uber engineer who helped scale one of the world’s largest distributed systems. They discuss Uber’s hyperscale infrastructure, what it takes to build an S3-compatible object store from scratch, and how distributed storage is evolving for the AI era.Follow Ovais:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ovaistariqLinkedIn:...

In this episode of Database School, Aaron talks with Preston Thorpe, a senior engineer at Turso who is currently incarcerated, about his incredible journey from prison to rewriting SQLite in Rust. They dive deep into concurrent writes, MVCC, and the challenges of building a new database from scratch while discussing redemption, resilience, and raw technical brilliance.Follow Preston and...

In this episode, Aaron talks with Joran Greef, CEO and creator of TigerBeetle, the world’s first financial transactions database. Joran takes us on a deep dive of on how TigerBeetle brings double-entry accounting principles directly into the database layer to achieve extreme correctness, performance, and fault tolerance at scale.Follow Joran and TigerBeetle:Twitter/X:...

Sam Lambert, my former boss at PlanetScale, talks to me about PlanetScale moving from a MySQL company to now also having a Postgres offering. Sam shares why PlanetScale decided to move to Postgres, how MySQL and Postgres are different at a technical level, and how the change has impacted the company culture. Stay to the end for a special surprise!PlanetScale Metal Episode:...