From MemSQL to HorizonDB, an engineer's journey with Adam Prout | Talking Postgres Ep39
What does it take to make Postgres and Azure fit together cleanly, like puzzle pieces? In Episode 39 of Talking Postgres, Adam Prout—distinguished engineer at Microsoft and a founding architect of Azure HorizonDB—joins Claire to trace his engineering journey from MemSQL to Postgres. We dig into shared-storage architecture and how HorizonDB pushes more work into the storage layer; why the team chose Rust; and what “good systems programming” looks like when being paranoid is a feature, not a bug. Along the way: startup vs big company tradeoffs, and how working on databases exposes you to so many interesting parts of computer science.Chapters:
⏩ 00:00 Music & introduction
⏩ 01:46 Footsteps from punch cards to C++
⏩ 09:28 When "SQL doesn't scale" was the meme
⏩ 22:37 Azure HorizonDB analogy to puzzle pieces
⏩ 27:25 Demand for cloud-native Postgres
⏩ 34:48 Pushing everything into the storage layer
⏩ 38:40 As soon as that Socrates paper came out
⏩ 41:38 Why Microsoft wants you to code in Rust
⏩ 50:52 Agents as extremely fast keyboards
⏩ 1:04:09 Why startups ship faster with a little lower quality
⏩ 1:11:58 The best systems programmers are paranoid
⏩ 1:18:26 You can see engineering culture in the code
📜 Full transcript available at: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/from-memsql-to-horizondb-an-engineers-journey-with-adam-prout/transcript
✅ Listen to more episodes of Talking Postgres:
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Previously on Talking Postgres:
🔹 Talking Postgres podcast Ep 29: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP8a_S2MjtY&list=PLixnExCn6lRrb_wV1yV9thFI1r7DOPhER&index=11
More Links mentioned in this episode:
🔹 Blog post: Announcing Azure HorizonDB: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpostgresql/announcing-azure-horizondb/4469710
🔹 CMUDB talk: HorizonDB: Co-Designing Postgres and Azure for Cloud-Native OLTP, by Adam Prout: https://youtu.be/EdgeqeW47_w?si=afGollXc4hl7ymuQ&t=23
🔹 Socrates: The New SQL Server in the Cloud: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/socrates.pdf
🔹 Azure HorizonDB: https://azure.microsoft.com/products/horizondb
🔹 Video of POSETTE 2025 talk: Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvY2kvi1Fa0&list=PLlrxD0HtieHjHHYfXx3llOlESrX1IpJro&index=37
🔹 OpenAI blog post: Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users, by Bohan Zhang: https://openai.com/index/scaling-postgresql/
🔹 Blog post: Supporting ChatGPT on PostgreSQL on Azure: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpostgresql/supporting-chatgpt-on-postgresql-in-azure/4490247
🔹 Docs: Azure Database for PostgreSQL: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/postgresql/
🔹 GitHub repo: pgrx: https://github.com/pgcentralfoundation/pgrx
🔹 Discord server: PostgreSQL Hacking: https://discord.gg/bx2G9KWyrY
🔹 PGConf.dev 2026 in Vancouver Canada: https://2026.pgconf.dev/
🔹 PGConf.dev 2026 schedule: https://2026.pgconf.dev/schedule/tuesday
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