Interview with Aiven

Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of the PGConf.DE 2025 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.

In which areas do you expect PostgreSQL to grow most and how does your company contribute to and benefit from that growth?

The lightweightness, extensibility and flexibility of postgres turned out to be the right design decision. Aiven offers pure core PostgreSQL as a managed service and with as many extensions as possible. To keep this running it is important to contribute as much as possible in code fixes and also community work and examples on how to get the most benefit from them.

We also have a team dedicated to building and maintaining tools that help people use AI to work with their data. We have many tools and code editors extensions that make it easy to optimize SQL Queries and Index Strategies and better write and understand SQL.

What is your PostgreSQL centered product and what makes it unique?

Aiven for PostgreSQL is a managed Postgres database that can be deployed on any major cloud. You can set up a managed Postgres database in less than 10 minutes — directly from our web console or programmatically via our API, CLI, Terraform provider or Kubernetes operator. One key fact is that you get straight Postgres and no fork and without any proprietary parts. As a helpful addition to lower database administrator work you can use Aiven AI database optimizer to get performance insights, and index and SQL rewrite suggestions to optimize performance. As we are offering other data management services like e.g. Kafka we also offer direct integrations to provide a full experience creating complete data ecosystems or pipelines.

What makes your company a great place to work?

We believe in open minds, open discussions, and open source. And we value and celebrate the diversity of our people. Aiven is somewhere you can be your best, true self. The work we do at Aiven is anything but straightforward, so we must be bold and innovative. For us, it’s not what you think , but how you think that matters. We encourage everyone at Aiven to think sideways and take big leaps forward.

How do you foster diversity in your company?

We recognize and respect everyone as a unique individual, taking pride in nurturing a diverse workplace where each employee is expected to treat others with dignity, courtesy and respect. We treat code commits the same regardless of who wrote them and suggestions that come from personal experience, background and culture are celebrated. Our teams are diverse because we know our users are as well. We hope each unique personality shines through our product.

Which of your company's contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference) are you most proud of?

PostgreSQL is one of our largest drivers so we try to support the community with bugfixing and any kind of contribution somehow possible with our team. We also hope to ensure that the community behind postgres is supported. This year, Aiven has committed to sponsoring and participating in many PostgreSQL events in the United States and Europe. We also have individuals at Aiven that are independently members of the PostgreSQL associations in the US and Europe.

Which PostgreSQL extension do you benefit from most, and why?

We try to provide as many extensions as possible to bring the best experience which is always a huge task for service providers in matters of support. Observing the actual hype the availability of vector databases is a very often requested technology for being a proper data platform for AI workloads. So beside having several databases with vector capabilities the extension pg_vector for PostgreSQL is at this time the most beneficial extension in our ecosystem.

What is the most annoying PostgreSQL problem, and do you have plans or ideas to fix it?

Many customers are first trying to use the multi-tenancy capabilities of PostgreSQL using several databases in one cluster instance to consolidate administration and save consumption costs. The lack of resource management and some caveats like point in time recovery are common traps for customers without that much database administration experience. Our support and solution architecture teams are always helping to solve this with proper workload distribution and architecture decisions. But even if this is not a problem, per design some resource management capabilities inside one cluster instance with several databases would be nice. At this moment there are ideas of providing shared resources in compute instances with getting a compromise of lower costs and consolidation of databases.