What happens when a database engineer spends 13 years on SQL Server and then starts working on Postgres? In Episode 41 of Talking Postgres, Distinguished Engineer Panagiotis “Panos” Antonopoulos of Microsoft joins Claire to share what surprised him most about making that transition. We explore why Postgres felt familiar from the start—and what shocked Panos about the clean and lean Postgres codebase. We also dig into how public mailing lists and AI can help explain why design decisions were made, why more people are asking “why not Postgres?”, and the shared-storage architecture behind Azure HorizonDB.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep 39: From MemSQL to HorizonDB, an engineer's journey with Adam Prout
• Talking Postgres Ep 38: How I went from Oracle to Postgres (with a big NoSQL detour) with Gwen Shapira
• Talking Postgres Ep 40: How I got started running a Postgres user group with Jeremy Schneider

Links mentioned in this episode:

• SIGMOD: ACM SIGMOD-PODS Conference 2027  
• CMUDB talk: HorizonDB: Co-Designing Postgres and Azure for Cloud-Native OLTP, by Adam Prout
• PostgreSQL mailing list: pgsql-hackers
• PostgreSQL docs: pg_stat_slru (simple least-recently-used)
• Docs: Azure HorizonDB
• Poster: Postgres Happiness Hints