Interview with credativ

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?: PostgreSQL's adherence to SQL standards and its ability to replace proprietary database systems make it increasingly popular among large companies. Its stability and scalability are particularly appealing for enterprise applications. The robust features, including support for complex queries, JSON and XML data types, full-text search, and window functions, combined with its extensibility via PostgreSQL extensions, make it a versatile choice for developers. Innovations in high availability and scalability are expected to further enhance its popularity.; The team at credativ and the company's initial founder contributed to PostgreSQL from the beginning. With Michael Banck credativ employs a well-known contributor to the FOSS and PostgreSQL world. For the last two decades, the credativ team was busy helping clients to switch from closed-source database systems to PostgreSQL and will continue to do so.
What is your PostgreSQL centered product and what makes it unique?: credativ GmbH's PostgreSQL-centered product is the PostgreSQL Competence Center. This center offers a comprehensive suite of services and support for PostgreSQL, covering the entire lifecycle of the database system within a company. The Competence Center offers comprehensive and extensive support for PostgreSQL including high availability, clustering, replication, tuning, optimization, and tailored monitoring environments. The expert team offers their support on a 24/7 basis and the support model is flexible with no dependence on the number of servers, CPUs or users.
What is your company's mission?: The mission of credativ GmbH is to provide comprehensive services and technical support for the introduction and operation of open-source software in corporate environments. Since its foundation in 1999, credativ GmbH has been committed to the idea of free software and has become one of the most successful companies exclusively focused on services in the open-source environment. The company offers premium support for numerous open-source projects, which play an essential role in the IT structures of many companies and are of strategic importance. The Open-Source Support Center operated by credativ ensures that clients can take full advantage of the benefits of free software, providing around-the-clock support 365 days a year. credativ GmbH's mission also includes actively supporting the development of open-source software and maintaining a strong commitment to the principles of free software. Their team consists of leading Linux specialists in Germany, who are highly respected on an international level.
Share a funny or memorable story about your company in relation to PostgreSQL (support case, dev issue, conference story...): We had a support case where a query failed with out of memory and "DETAIL: Cannot enlarge string buffer containing 10XXXXXXXXX bytes by YY more bytes" - it turned out that the customer had migrated from an Oracle database and kept a 2-way partitioning scheme first by day and secondly for a large list that resulted in tens of thousands of partitions. It turned out that the query plan was too large (more than 1GB) to send to the parallel workers in case parallel query was used which resulted in the error. Forcing the query to not use parallelism made it run without errors.
What makes you want to attend the PGConf.DE conference?: We have been participating in PGConf.DE for a long time, and it is always a great place to interact with the PostgreSQL community and current and prospective customers. We also like to share our knowledge by giving conference talks at PGConf.DE to make more and more users aware of the benefits of PostgreSQL.