Interview with Aiven
Find out more about our sponsor Aiven
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 2025 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
Which of your company's contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference/sponsorship) are you most proud of?
PostgreSQL is at the heart of what we do at Aiven and one of our largest drivers so we try to support the community with bugfixing and any kind of contribution somehow possible with our team. We also believe strongly in supporting the community that drives its success.This year, Aiven has committed to sponsoring and participating in many PostgreSQL events in Europe and the United States. Sponsoring PostgreSQLConferences is our way of contributing to that community, sharing knowledge, and connecting with developers, architects, and businesses that rely on PostgreSQL to power their data infrastructure. It is also a great opportunity to engage with users, exchange ideas, and hear directly from the people who are building with Postgres every day. We also have individuals at Aiven that are independently members of the PostgreSQL associations in the US and Europe.
In which areas do you expect PostgreSQL to grow most and how does your company contribute to and benefit from that growth?
The lightweightness, extensibility and flexibility of postgres turned out to be the right design decision. Aiven offers pure core PostgreSQL as a managed service and with as many extensions as possible. To keep this running it is important to contribute as much as possible in code fixes and also community work and examples on how to get the most benefit from them. We also have a team dedicated to building and maintaining tools that help people use AI to work with their data. We have many tools and code editors extensions that make it easy to optimize SQL Queries and Index Strategies and better write and understand SQL.
What is your PostgreSQL centered product?
Aiven for PostgreSQL is a managed PostgreSQL Instance offering automatic updates and upgrades with 99.99% uptime and 100% human support. That’s zero stress! You can spin up a database quickly on a cloud provider of your choice like AWS, Google, Azure, Digital Ocean, and UpCloud. Once you select your plan, cloud provider and region, your service will start building. If you scale your workload to include multi-cloud redundancy or multi-region replication, you can go from a proof of concept to a production ready environment in a few clicks. Simply put, Aiven gives you the easiest way to spin up PostgreSQL services to fit your needs.
What feature in the last PostgreSQL version benefits your company most?
For us there is no specific feature more or less important than the fact to give customers the chance to use every feature as fast and reliably as possible. Because our managed PostgreSQL service is exactly the core version without any proprietary changes we were the first managed PostgreSQL provider to support the newest version of PostgreSQL, version 18, available for production right at the same time as the official release. We spend a huge effort to take part in testing the beta versions and the release candidates based on functionality and also for our deployment. So it doesn’t matter which feature we benefit the most, we are benefitting from having customers being able to use all the features directly and with a smooth experience.
Which PostgreSQL extension do you benefit from most, and why?
We try to provide as many extensions as possible to bring the best experience which is always a huge task for service providers in matters of support. Observing the actual hype the availability of vector databases is a very often requested technology for being a proper data platform for AI workloads. So beside having several databases with vector capabilities the extension pg_vector for PostgreSQL is at this time the most beneficial extension in our ecosystem.
