Interview with CYBERTEC
Find out more about our sponsor CYBERTEC
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of the PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2026 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 is growing fastest in cloud-native deployments, AI/ML workloads (thanks to vector search), and as an analytical companion to transactional systems. As a tech services company, CYBERTEC contributes to that growth by helping customers migrate, operate, and modernize their PostgreSQL infrastructures - and by training the next generation of PostgreSQL professionals, so the ecosystem grows alongside the technology.
We benefit directly from this: every new use case creates consulting, support, and training demand, and our engineers stay at the forefront of the ecosystem because they work on these projects every day.
How does PostgreSQL help you bring value to your customers?
At CYBERTEC, PostgreSQL is the foundation of almost everything we do. We help customers design, build, and operate PostgreSQL systems that stay fast, reliable, and easy to scale, from startup databases to mission-critical environments with millions of rows per day.
In practice that means performance tuning, high availability, safe upgrades, and training that makes our customers' own teams self-sufficient. The value is measurable: fewer outages, faster queries, and engineers who feel confident instead of afraid of their database.
Which of your company's contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community conference/sponsorship) are you most proud of?
We are most proud of pg_hardstorage, the PostgreSQL backup engine we built on top of hard links. It creates fast, consistent backups of even very large databases with minimal copying overhead, so backing up terabytes of data no longer means hours of downtime or bloated storage.
We are equally proud of our training: we have taught PostgreSQL for over 25 years, and many CYBERTEC people have become trainers, conference speakers, and community contributors through it.
Finally, our long-running involvement in PGConf.EU - as attendees, speakers, and now platinum sponsors - lets us give back to the community that has shaped our company.
Which feature from the latest PostgreSQL release has had the biggest impact on your work, and why?
PostgreSQL 18's incremental backup and restore in pg_basebackup is the headline for us. For a primarily support, services and training company, that is a big deal: restoring large databases becomes dramatically faster and simpler, and we can recommend a native solution instead of complex third-party pipelines.
We also love the expanded SQL/JSON support, which makes PostgreSQL an even better single database for hybrid transactional and analytical workloads. In the classroom and on support tickets, both features are changing what we tell customers is the default way of doing things.
If you could recommend only one PostgreSQL extension to attendees, which would it be and why?
If we could recommend only one extension, it would be pg_stat_statements. It is included with PostgreSQL and provides visibility into query execution statistics, helping you identify which statements consume the most resources. Instead of guessing where a performance problem comes from, you can use this data to focus optimization efforts on the queries that actually matter.
For conference attendees, the advice is straightforward: enable pg_stat_statements in production where appropriate and use it as part of your regular performance-monitoring workflow. It can quickly become one of the most useful tools for diagnosing query-performance issues.
What career paths are available at your company for PostgreSQL specialists?
PostgreSQL specialists at CYBERTEC can grow in several directions: as engineers and consultants, from database administration to architecture and solution design; as developers of open-source tools like pg_repack; as trainers who turn deep expertise into courses; and as community ambassadors speaking at conferences.
We support these paths with internal knowledge sharing, certifications, and conference budgets, most of our senior consultants became trainers, authors, or speakers along the way.
PostgreSQL turns 30 this year. What is your favorite PostgreSQL memory, milestone, or achievement from the last 30 years?
PostgreSQL turning 30 is a milestone we genuinely celebrate: in the early 2000s it was a brave choice to run production systems on it, and today it is one of the most trusted open-source databases in the world, a story of a community that outlived every hype cycle.
Our favorite memory is seeing that journey from the inside: the first big Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migration, the first customer who asked for training because "everyone is switching now," and the current moment when PostgreSQL is the default choice for new AI-ready applications. Thirty years of community and we are just getting started!
