Hi there! I’m Jean-Paul Argudo. I have some background in PostgreSQL for some time now.

I’ve tried to make it short in the about section of this website. Consider the following series of posts the “longer version”.

This is the very first post on this new blog!

I hesitated a long time to reopen a blog, but I feel it’s now the time to do so. I’m also less and less confident on the right pre-made, commercial website to host blogs, including LinkedIn… So I’ve started my own, thanks to the wonderfull Hugo tool and some beatyfull and simple Nightfall theme.

Why this SERIES of posts ?

In some of the last events I participated, pgDay Paris 2024 and PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2024, 3 different people asked me about “do you have a blog?”… It’s very flattering to hear that people have interest in you. It’s also disturbing, since I don’t like to be the one in front of the others, despite in my career I had to do that a lot

One told me: “I think you should share that knowledge you have on the PostgreSQL community and history !”.

The other one said: “what? you’re there from that long, you must know a ton… Why don’t you blog it? Or maybe you did already?”…

I actually understood and realized that:

• blogs are not dead after all, even youger people have interest to it
• I read blogs myself so… why don’t have my own?
• I saw since then a lot of tech people getting back to blogs, specially in the PostgreSQL community
• I’m probably shy… But I like so much to share knowledge… That later argument is stronger I think
• Also I’ve proposed many talks in many conferences the last couple of years, and all have been rejected. I clearly understood why, and I have no bad feelings about it. Still, I’m frustrated about it, so why not write somewhere what I have to say, and whoever finds that interesting will read…

I never wanted to be “under the spot lights”. And I really hate to bring attention. But after all, I came to the conclusion that if you are here, and still reading this, that’s because you want.

I’ll start with that idea, and I warn you, I can write as I speak, fast and way too much. Don’t blame me for that. You’re here because you want too, right? Not my fault :-)

The first version of this “first blog post” ended in a 900+ lines of text in Markdown, with Hugo algorithms telling me that this is 20 minutes read.. So I prefered transforming the original post in a series of posts. I gave them the first start of title with “My life (#number): title”… I don’t know how much numbers I’ll do as posts. But let’s say there will be a few, I think..

Of course, others may be posted “in between”, so I’ll tag those #mylife !

I just thought that I should first do that retrospective of about 25 years working in and for the PostgreSQL community. I’ve never been classified as a PostgreSQL Contributor, but I don’t care. This Community gave me so much, I’ll never live long enough to give back everything.

First Job

I remember my very first job, before IdealX. I was very disapointed to understand that it was “full proprietary, everywhere”. It was a big difference with what I was working previously while I was at the University doing my MSc in both computing and economics.

I tried very hard to convince that, as an example, for sources, we rather use CVS rather than Microsoft’s Visual Source Safe thing.

On the RDBMS, I was using a ton, and that quickly pushed me into the direction of becoming the DBA there. I ended being an Oracle 8i “OCP…

I was very resigned and tought that at work, you have to use Windows and proprietary things, just to be paid at the end of the month..

One of my boss was Sébastien Lieutaud. After a short period of time in that position, he went away from there… 6 months after that, he called me like:

• Hey you remember me?… You were the one talking about Open Source software… I’m in a new company, called IdealX. We do 100% Open Source. It’s in Paris. You can work remote if you want… We will need you as a DBA, we have Oracle things to do under Linux. You’ll work 100% Linux…

Enough said, I resigned, and joined IdealX.

I’m lucky since 2000, I never had to work with anything else than Linux.

Thank you David Barth

First, I want to thank David Barth. When I started at IdealX, I was a bit desperate about Open Source RDBMS.

If MySQL answered my questions about “what’s happening between a SQL query sent… and the results I have ?”… I was very unhappy with it.

I was desperately was searching for an RDBMS capable of … kicking out Oracle, because I (already) couldn’t stand their “behaviour” with customers.

At that time, MySQL’s wasn’t ACID compliant, had quite no MVCC… It was possible to insert a date as February 30th, etc.

Then David told me “did you looked at PostgreSQL?”. That was the start. If I recall well the first sources I read then was version 7.0!

I just fell in love at first sight (of the sources): everything was clear, well documented (and of course still is). I finally undestood clearly what’s going on in the core of an RDBMS, from the SQL query to the result sent.

I remember literaly spending nights to undestand, test, and ofc, crash. PostgreSQL wasn’t very stable. But it was very satisfying to me, because I learnt a ton.

IdealX

I started reading the pgsql-hackers mailing-list at a time when one hour, maybe two was necessary to read every mail of the day. Today, often, I need one complete hour to just understand what a single mail can talk about…

Reading my very first post on pgsql-hackers now is very fun… The 50yo me reading the 27yo makes me smile. Not only my crappy English, but the general tone, the name of my laptop (pastis), the quote about Gilles Darold’s Ora2Pg… I never tought at this time I’ll be the one hiring Gilles some 10 years after :-)

So I quickly started to make some noise at IdealX, telling people PostgreSQL could be used, we could migrate at least some workloads from Oracle to PostgreSQL.

So we did. A bit. But I saw many projects start with PostgreSQL directly. Just because of that ACID thing, and the fact that PostgreSQL was already a platform capable of many things, like procedural languages in C, Perl, whatever.. I remember a customer that did migrate their website from Perl+MySQL to “only PostgreSQL”, thanks to PL/Perl.

Then many start-ups just falled appart in ~2001, and I decided to quit, because IdealX was falling into pieces too.

I integrated the backend of an insurance company and started installing open source everywhere… And I’ve been able to have people use PostgreSQL, as much as possible.

Since then I started as a PostgreSQL professional, and never stoped to be.