Interview with Tembo
Find out more about our sponsor Tembo
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of the PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2024 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
What is your PostgreSQL centered product?
A number of memes have emerged in recent years like just use Postgres and Postgres for everything — but in truth it’s very hard to use Postgres for anything other than its “vanilla” OLTP use case. You get stuck at finding which extensions to use, how to install and put them together, and how to configure Postgres appropriately for that use case. Tembo’s objective is to make it easy for developers to access the whole Postgres ecosystem.
We are building a dev-first, fully-extensible, fully-managed, secure, and scalable Postgres service. Tembo Cloud provides the largest library of easily-installed extensions and “flavored Postgres” Tembo Stacks. Stacks are pre-built, use case-specific configurations of Postgres, enabling you to quickly deploy specialized data services that can replace external, non-Postgres data services (read: less complexity).
Currently, we have Stacks designed for Message Queue, Vector DB, RAG, Geospatial, Time Series, Data Warehouse, and more!
In which areas do you expect PostgreSQL to grow most and how does your company contribute to and benefit from that growth?
The modern data stack is growing, in complexity and from a costs perspective too. The need to adapt to new architectures, configurations, and optimizations makes the transition value often negligible. Businesses and developers alike would prefer being able to turn to a single open source solution for their problems. While Postgres is widely adopted and services a wide variety of use cases, deploying and managing it is still complicated, having to consider infrastructure, environment, security, data management, backups, and workload-specific tuning. Further, maintaining and scaling Postgres involves meeting high availability requirements, managing data storage, updating schemas, optimizing query performance, and managing failover protection and caching.
We want you to want to double-down on Postgres and we’re building the infrastructure for you to do so.
Which of your company's contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference/sponsorship) are you most proud of?
In one of the Postgres Extension Ecosystem Mini-Summits Ian Stanton, Founding Engineer here at Tembo, talked about how Trunk powers Tembo Cloud's extension management experience. When we were building Tembo Cloud extensions were baked into our Postgres container images, but we really wanted a way to install extension binaries on the fly without rebuilding container images. Best way to do that was with prebuilt extensions. We explored the ecosystem for suitable solutions, including PGXN (started in 2011 by another Tembonaut, David Wheeler) and apt/yum, and maybe more surprisingly Rust’s crates.io. Trunk today has 200+ extensions in its extension management experience, and will inform and be the basis of binary packaging/distribution/installation features in PGXN version 2.
Two of our extensions we would like to highlight are pgmq and pg_vectorize. pg_vectorize automates the transformation and orchestration of text to embeddings and provides hooks into the most popular LLMs. This allows you to do vector search and build LLM applications on existing data. The project relies heavily on the work by pgvector for vector similarity search, and pgmq for orchestration in background workers. pgmq then is a lightweight message queue for and on Postgres.
Is one of your employees speaking at PostgreSQL Conference Europe? What is the talk about?
Our Head of Education Floor had her talk about supporting Postgres’ extension ecosystem accepted. Looking at other communities, she wants to consider what an (actionable) annual State of the Extension Ecosystem could look like. Postgres’ extensibility today is both its biggest strength and its biggest threat too.
We also intend to submit some Lightning Talks, those high-energy 5-minute presentations are so fun to do and also to watch!
Why does your company attend PostgreSQL Conference Europe?
We attend PGConf EU because we like to meet the community, and exchange ideas with other contributors and users. Last year we attended PGConf EU in Prague and had a great time connecting with peers. And: who wouldn’t want to be in Athens in the fall?
