Interview with Xata
Find out more about our sponsor Xata
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.
How does PostgreSQL help you bring value to your customers?
At Xata, we are building a PostgreSQL Database platform designed to meet all your application development needs, complete with comprehensive tooling. This means you don’t have to worry about the complexities of your architecture, as we handle challenging tasks like zero-downtime schema migrations and replication to other data stores.
PostgreSQL is the cornerstone of our product, and we have developed a range of features and tools to significantly simplify the development experience. We chose PostgreSQL because it is a leading, battle-tested database in the industry. Its reliability and performance have been proven over time, making it a trusted choice for many businesses.
By centering our platform around PostgreSQL, we enable users to adopt and adapt to it more quickly, ensuring they can leverage its full potential with minimal hassle. This focus allows us to provide substantial value to our customers, enhancing their productivity and streamlining their development processes.
What makes your company a great place to work?
A key benefit we offer is a healthy work-life balance. We understand the importance of personal time and ensure our employees can manage their professional and personal lives seamlessly. We’re a remote-first company with extensive experience in distributed work, particularly from our backgrounds at Elastic. We excel in asynchronous decision-making and only hold meetings when absolutely necessary, allowing for a more flexible workweek. This flexibility means you can attend to personal matters, like family commitments, and easily jump back into work without disrupting team dynamics.
Additionally, inclusivity is a cornerstone of our culture, especially when it comes to family. We host biannual offsites and create swag multiple times a year, always including family members and spouses. Our offsites are family-oriented, with activities designed to include children and ensure they have as much fun as everyone else. This unique approach ensures that it’s not just you working at Xata—your whole family gets to participate in various ways.
Which of your company’s contributions to the PostgreSQL Project are you most proud of?
We’re particularly proud of our open-source contributions to the PostgreSQL community. One standout project is pgroll, which enables zero-downtime schema migrations. This tool allows for seamless swaps between PostgreSQL schemas and immediate rollback if needed, ensuring uninterrupted application performanc and it has already received significant positive feedback and activity on GitHub.
We also recently released pgzx, an open source framework to easily build PostgreSQL extensions in Zig, a systems programming language for maintainable and fast code. Pgzx is part of our broader effort to develop an open-source distributed solution for PostgreSQL.
Additionally, we recently launched pgstream, a change data capture solution that replicates data to other stores or webhooks based on PostgreSQL schema changes. Internally, we use Pgstream to replicate data to Elasticsearch, and we’re excited to share it with the community for further development and use. Our open-source projects have received enthusiastic support from the PostgreSQL community, and we look forward to contributing even more in the future.
