Andy Pavlo

HorizonDB: Co‑Designing PostgreSQL and Azure for Cloud‑Native OLTP (Adam Prout) - Carnegie Mellon Database Group Azure HorizonDB is a new PostgreSQL service that improves the OLTP performance... Read More +

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Adam Prout will present the architecture of Microsoft Azure HorizonDB database service based on PostgreSQL. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

TopK: Billion-Scale Hybrid Retrieval from the Ground Up (Marek Galovic) - Carnegie Mellon Database Group TopK is a search engine built from the ground up for unstructured... Read More +

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Marek Galovic
will present the TopK document + vector search engine system. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Aurora DSQL: Serverless, Scalable, Global OLTP (Marc Brooker) - Carnegie Mellon Database Group Amazon Aurora DSQL is a distributed SQL database, designed to make it... Read More +

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Marc Brooker (@marcbrooker.bsky.social) will present the architecture of Amazon's Aurora DSQL Postgres-compatible serverless OLTP DBMS. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Redpanda Oxla or: Why Your Hashmaps are Secretly Wrecking Your Performance (Tyler Akidau + Adam Symanski) - Carnegie Mellon Database Group In this talk, we’ll first give an overview of the Oxla analytical... Read More +

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Tyler Akidau + Adam Symanski will present the architecture of @redpanda.com's Oxla database system. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

PostgreSQL vs. The World Seminar Series Schedule https://db.cs.cmu.edu/seminars/spring2026/

SCHEDULE
Feb 2: @redpanda.com Oxla
Feb 9: Amazon DSQL
Feb 16: TopK
Feb 23: HorizonDB
Mar 9: @turbopuffer.bsky.social
Mar 16: @yugabytedb.bsky.social
Mar 23: TonicDB
Mar 30: PixelTable
Apr 6: @spacetimedb.bsky.social
Apr 13: @supabase.com Multigres
Apr 20: @villagesql.bsky.social

PostgreSQL vs. The World Seminar Series - Carnegie Mellon Database Group Every major cloud vendor now offers an enhanced, opinionated PostgreSQL-compatible database management... Read More +

Spring 2026 Seminar Series: PostgreSQL vs. The World
db.cs.cmu.edu/seminars/spr...
First talk on Mon Feb 2nd @ 4:30pm EST. We will alternate between a speaker from either a Postgres DBMS or a non-Postgres DBMS. Open to the public over Zoom. All videos available on YouTube afterwards.

Andy speaking at OpenAI on Wednesday January 21, 2026.

Thanks to Bohan Zhang for hosting me at OpenAI yesterday. Lots of @db.cs.cmu.edu alum are thriving there. Plus the Rockset squad rolled up. It was the nicest tech office I've visited in my life. It was like a classy lawfirm but with an insane number of ex-FBI bouncers at the front entrance.

Tianyu Li (Wisconsin) CIDR 2026 Gong Show Winner

Fuheng Zhao CIDR 2026 Database Quiz Winner

Congratulations to the 2026 CIDR prize awardees!
Tianyu Li → Gong Show Winner
Fuheng Zhao → Database Quiz Winner
They each received a rare signed print of "The Birth of the Database Messiah" (estimated insurance value $12,000).

Andy Pavlo (@andypavlo.bsky.social) on X: "EinsteinDB is a new DBMS making bold claims about what they do: • Post-quantum Merkle Trees • Horn Rules for Time Travel • Relativistic Linearizability (IMO this is obscure) • #NoCode • Persistent Memory Support • @OpenAI #gpt3 integration https://t.co/tWlh5Owoox" / X EinsteinDB is a new DBMS making bold claims about what they do: • Post-quantum Merkle Trees • Horn Rules for Time Travel • Relativistic Linearizability (IMO this is obscure) • #NoCode • Persistent Memory Support • @OpenAI #gpt3 integration https://t.co/tWlh5Owoox

Again, I don't want to just bash other people's databases all day especially since we made many mistakes in our last system. But I do enjoy calling out bizarre implementation claims.

ResonaGraph is puffery. I think EinsteinDB guy was a TempleOS case and he needed help: twitter.com/andy_pavlo/s...

What we could tell with the help with Claude, it is just fancy erasure coding and not quantum mysticism. H/T @wslim.bsky.social

Half way reading through it I thought I was being trolled because they claim their database can do all of this!?! If it said it was using MMAP then it would like they are listening to my conversations. But there is code and they're at least using RocksDB to do something: github.com/sschepis/res...

I Built a Database that Teleports Data Instead of Transmitting it https://medium.com/@sschepis/i-built-a-database-that-teleports-data-instead-of-transmitting-it-518bb34986f7

I recently came across this database system in my travels: medium.com/@sschepis/i-...
The title immediately raises my BS alarms. They claim to "teleport data" via "quantum mechanical principles".

https://twitter.com/RYJOXTech/status/1995865192555839883

Spoiler: It does not scale when mmap paging becomes the real bottleneck. twitter.com/RYJOXTech/st...

Synrix MMAP Comparison Table https://ryjoxdemo.com/benchmarks

I don't want to cook such an early stage company but I think these people are trying to sell MMAP as a service?!? No technical details except it appears to be a MMAP buffer pool. I also don't know why their system is "fully ACID" but RocksDB is not? ryjoxdemo.com/solutions/ed...

Little Bobby Tables' Go To Market Strategy

At least this scam company remembered to sanitize their database inputs before sending out their spam...

Databases in 2025: A Year in Review The world tried to kill Andy off but he had to stay alive to to talk about what happened with databases in 2025.

I've posted my latest recap of the world of databases: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/...

All the hot topics from the last year:
• More Postgres action!
• MCP for everyone!
• MongoDB gets litigious with FerretDB!
• File formats!
• Market movements!
• The richest person in the history of the world!

Yes of course. I usually start writing it around Xmas to go out at the beginning of the new year.

Andy aggressively holding Wan after completing his thesis defense.

Congratulations to the #1 ranked @db.cs.cmu.edu PhD student Wan Shen Lim (@wslim.bsky.social) for successfully passing his doctoral defense. Wan has been working on hard AF database research with me for the last *nine* years at CMU (undergrad+grad). He also hates chickens.

in a tiny job update: I'm taking over as co-director of CMU's parallel data lab (PDL).

in a bad news update: I just used the phrase "align with CMU's brand strategy" unironically in an email to the administration.

might need an intervention...

I got bad news for you about the other three Turing Awards in databases:
• Charles Bachmann: Died 2017
• Edgar Codd: Died 2003
• Jim Gray: Died 2012 (declared in absentia)

And technically none of them are professors.

[Future Data] Apache Fluss: A Streaming Storage for Real-Time Lakehouse - Carnegie Mellon Database Group Modern data lakehouses promise unified batch and streaming processing, yet their storage... Read More +

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Jark Wu from AlibabaCloud will present an overview of Apache Fluss. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

2025 in Review with Mike Stonebraker and Andy Pavlo Webcast Dec 10: DBMS researchers Mike Stonebraker (MIT / DBOS) and Andy Pavlo (CMU) discuss which data and CS trends are heating up or cooling down heading into 2026.

Do you like databases?
Do you want to hear two database professors rant about them?
Do you need one of those professors to have a Turing Award for databases?
If yes, then join Mike Stonebraker and I next Wed Dec 10 @ 1:00pm EST for database hot takes: www.dbos.dev/webcast-2025...

There is still time to register for CIDR 2026 in Santa Cruz! If you need a roommate for the conference, there is also a spreadsheet you can use to find someone! www.cidrdb.org/cidr2026/reg...

[Future Data] From Storage Formats to Open Governance: The Evolution to Apache Polaris - Carnegie Mellon Database Group As organizations build their data lakehouses on Apache Iceberg, the primary challenge... Read More +

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Prashant Singh from Snowflake will present the Apache Polaris re-implementation of the Iceberg REST catalog API. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

[Future Data] Reconstructing History with XTDB - Carnegie Mellon Database Group XTDB is a SQL database that challenges long held assumptions about how... Read More +

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Jeremy Taylor (@refset.bsky.social) will present the architecture of the XTDB (@xtdb.com) time-traveling database system. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

[Future Data] Why Powering User Facing Applications on Iceberg is Hard - Carnegie Mellon Database Group Firebolt is a Postgres compliant analytical database built for low-latency, high-concurrency analytics.... Read More +

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Benjamin Wagner🇩🇪 will present @firebolthq.bsky.social's native support for low-latency queries on Apache Iceberg tables. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

TIL

[Future Data] Mooncake: Real-Time Apache Iceberg Without Compromise - Carnegie Mellon Database Group Apache Iceberg is great for large-scale analytics, but it was built for... Read More +

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Cheng Chen will present how @mooncakelabs.bsky.social extends PostgreSQL to support Apache Iceberg. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Great idea to compare plans across different systems using rows processed. A good yardstick, but slower sort-based plans from Postgres + MSSQL process fewer rows than faster hash-based plans from DuckDB. Postgres rows scanned also seem underreported. Nice to see some competition with ClickBench.

SQL Arena Planner Ranking (November 2025)

New database leaderboard from Yellowbrick ranks the quality of DBMS optimizer estimates and plans. They only evaluate TPC-H for now and report results for Postgres + DuckDB + MSSQL: sql-arena.com/components/p...
Repo: github.com/sql-arena/db...
LinkedIn Group: www.linkedin.com/groups/15775...