Postgres and Open Source Experts

Welcome back to More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions.In this episode, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake talks with Justin Graf, Senior DBA & Engineer at Command Prompt, about a topic every Postgres team needs to understand: why monitoring alone isn’t enough—and why full logging is essential for diagnosing database problems. Justin explains how organizations often rely solely on monitoring tools like PGStatStatements, CloudWatch, or Datadog, without realizing that these tools can’t show query parameters, historical performance shifts, or the root cause behind sudden CPU spikes. Without full logging, teams end up blind during outages, wasting hours trying to detect issues that proper logs would have revealed immediately.

In this special AWS-focused T3D segment, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake sits down with Greg Dostatni, Senior DBA at Command Prompt, to unpack a topic that every team running PostgreSQL in the cloud eventually needs to face: how your AWS decisions today shape your flexibility, cost, and vendor dependencies tomorrow.

Drawing on years of experience with platform migrations, cloud transitions, and large-scale infrastructure projects, Greg explains why AWS is powerful and convenient—but not something you should treat as permanent. Whether the trigger is pricing, features, licensing, mergers, or internal strategy shifts, every organization eventually reaches a point where moving away from a vendor becomes necessary.

If you’re building on AWS, evaluating cloud Postgres options, or planning long-term infrastructure strategy, this AWS special segment provides a clear, grounded perspective on navigating cloud choice—and exit—responsibly.

Have a conversation with our guest and his AWS expertise by contacting Command Prompt.

James breaks down the difference between checking the box for compliance and implementing meaningful, real-world security. From encryption-at-rest misunderstandings to SQL injection vulnerabilities that still plague organizations today, he explains why companies often miss the point — and how to approach security controls in a way that actually protects your data.If you’ve ever felt stuck in endless compliance meetings, wrestled with vague requirements like “encryption at rest,” or questioned whether your MFA strategy makes sense, this short talk is for you.

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Welcome to Episode 13 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions!

In this session, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake sits down with Kevin Jernigan, Chief Product Officer at J4 Capital LLC, whose career spans decades across the world’s biggest database and cloud companies.Kevin walks us through his journey from Oracle, AWS (Aurora PostgreSQL), MongoDB (Atlas Serverless), and Google Cloud, reflecting on what it meant to “reinvent the wheel” in database engineering — and why he ultimately stepped away from the database world.

If you’re interested in databases, AI efficiency, brain-scale compute, or the future of machine learning, this short talk is for you.

Welcome to Episode 14 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D SessionsCommand Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Valerii Herman, Python Developer at Command Prompt, about Cython — a superset of Python that combines Python’s simplicity with C’s performance.Valerii explains how Cython lets developers keep the readability of Python while selectively compiling performance-heavy sections into C extensions. Beyond speed, he shares how Cython can also be used for code obfuscation, making it harder to reverse engineer intellectual property.

Reach out to Command Prompt to discuss further.

Welcome to Episode 11 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D SessionsCommand Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Eugene Dubinin, Senior Developer & Project Lead at Command Prompt, about strategies for fighting web application registration spam — a problem they faced firsthand while maintaining the Postgres Conference website.Eugene explains why simple measures like CAPTCHAs and honeypots aren’t enough on their own, and how a pipeline of layered defenses can drastically reduce spam accounts.

Dive deeper into this conversation, contact Command Prompt today.

Welcome to Episode 10 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions

Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Andrew Sullivan — President of Anvil Walrus Den Holdings, Inc. and longtime Internet engineer and policy leader.

Andrew explains how the open, decentralized Internet envisioned by its founders is being reshaped by the dominance of just a handful of tech giants. From Canada’s policy battles with Meta and Google to the way platforms have replaced the open web for billions of people, Andrew highlights what’s at stake.

Welcome to Episode 9 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D SessionsIn this episode, Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake sits down with Hunter O’Brien, Jr Sysadmin/Jr DBA at Command Prompt, to talk about why monitoring isn’t one-size-fits-all.They explore how out-of-the-box tools often give shallow insights, and why teams should leverage their QA and test environments to improve production monitoring.Hunter shares examples like catching Postgres sequence wraparound, setting up smarter disk alerts, and customizing metrics so they actually reflect your environment — not just a template.If you’re running PostgreSQL in production, this short talk will help you turn your monitoring from noise into useful signals.

To dive deeper into this content, contact Command Prompt.

Welcome to Episode 8 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions.

Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Silona Bonewald, Open Source Standards Pioneer and InnerSource Expert, about 10 things you didn’t know about blockchain. Silona takes a historical and systemic look at how blockchain emerged long before Bitcoin, and why its uses go far beyond cryptocurrency.

Welcome to Episode 6 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions. Command Prompt Founder Joshua “JD” Drake sits down with his colleague Brian Fehrle, DBA at Command Prompt, to dive into one of the toughest challenges for fast-growing applications: scaling your database without breaking the bank.

Brian shares real-world lessons on what happens when traffic spikes, why simply “throwing more hardware at it” is a dangerous (and expensive) band-aid, and how smarter approaches—like monitoring PostgreSQL catalog stats, tuning autovacuum, and implementing partitioning—can save organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To dive deeper into this discussion contact Command Prompt.

Welcome to Episode 5 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions

Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Alan Chavez — Product Engineer specialized in Growth, and Chief Technology Officer at Torta Studios — about the practice of growth engineering and how data-driven decisions shape the success of new products.

Alan shares how retention and activation metrics drive real business outcomes, why retention curves are critical signals of product viability, and how activation benchmarks can determine long-term success.

Welcome to Episode 4 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions
Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Greg Dostatni, DBA at Command Prompt, about the Kubernetes mantra “cattle, not pets” — and why that doesn’t always hold true when it comes to PostgreSQL databases.

They explore why stateless services scale easily in Kubernetes, but databases face serious challenges around failover, replication, and recovery. Greg makes the case that databases must be treated as pets — because when the data is gone, it’s game over.

If you’re running Postgres at scale or evaluating Kubernetes for databases, this short talk is for you.

To dive deeper into this content contact Command Prompt.

Welcome to Episode 3 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions

Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake sits down with Dr. Aaron N. Cutshall, Principal Data Architect at SQLRV, LLC., to discuss the power and performance benefits of set-based processing in relational databases like PostgreSQL.

With database experience dating back to the 1980s, Aaron shares why set-based thinking is disappearing from modern education, how treating a database like a file system hurts performance, and why leveraging the database engine for what it was designed to do can yield exponential speed gains.

From clear analogies—like magnets for sorting ball bearings—to real-world performance comparisons, this short talk challenges developers to rethink iterative, row-by-row approaches and embrace the efficiency of set-based operations.If you work with Postgres, big data, or want to sharpen your database fundamentals, this episode is for you.

Welcome to Episode 2 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions

Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Victor Olex, Founder and CEO of SlashDB — a platform that instantly turns databases into RESTful APIs with support for JSON, XML, CSV, and even a full HTML-based UI for exploring and querying data.

They explore how SlashDB stands out in a crowded API ecosystem — including in comparison to tools like PostgREST, which expose PostgreSQL as a RESTful API — by offering a plug-and-play solution for accessing and managing data in multiple formats with no middleware coding needed.

Victor also shares details about SlashDB v2.0, its new React-based front end, enhanced modularity, and connection pooling for performance at scale. If you’re working with legacy systems, SaaS transitions, or data accessibility, this short talk is for you.

Learn more about SlashDB at https://slashdb.com/

Welcome to Episode 1 of More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions

Command Prompt Founder Joshua "JD" Drake chats with Tushar Pednekar, Co-founder of Synx Data Labs, about Apache CloudBerry — a new open source, Postgres-based analytics platform designed to scale from terabytes to petabytes.

They explore how CloudBerry offers a true open-source alternative to legacy systems like Greenplum, the importance of code parity with PostgreSQL, and why stability and governance matter in enterprise-grade analytics. If you're into distributed computing, big data, or Postgres at scale, this 10-minute talk is for you.

Welcome to episode 52 of More Than a Refresh, where JD sits down with Patrick Broderick, Consulting Forester and Founder @ Eastside Forestry.

In this episode, Patrick and JD discuss passion vs. profit, why our forests need a guiding hand, and how both sides of the political aisle are thinking about conservation all wrong.

For educational resources on the state of our forests, to get involved in the conservation effort, or to make a donation to a non-profit that is doing the boots-on-the-ground work, please visit https://www.kittitasconservationtrust.org/donate/