Turing Award Winner: Postgres, Disagreeing with Google, Future Problems

Mike Stonebraker, Turing Award winner and creator of Ingres and Postgres, shares the history behind building these foundational database systems, explains why he publicly disagreed with Google's MapReduce and eventual consistency approaches (which Google later abandoned with Spanner), and critiques Amazon's proliferation of database services. He discusses his current startup DBOSS, which applies database principles to workflow orchestration and application state management. He also covers the limitations of LLMs for text-to-SQL on real-world data warehouses — where accuracy drops to 0% compared to 80%+ on academic benchmarks — and argues that turning heterogeneous data sources into SQL tables with a query optimizer is the right approach for agentic AI workloads.