Peter Geoghegan

Background

About Peter Geoghegan

Author and reviewer of many features in PostgreSQL RDBMS, with a recent emphasis on in the standard B-Tree index access method and on VACUUM. Also behind many enhancements and bug fixes to PostgreSQL in areas such as concurrency control, logging and recovery, and tuple sorting.I try to see hard problems from every perspective; I feel that I owe a lot of my success to a certain kind of holistic thinking. For example, I sometimes start performance enhancement projects by understanding the path dependence that led to a certain design in PostgreSQL. I'll then compare it to a competing or related design from the DB research literature, or from some other branch of CS - this will naturally have a complicated history of its own. My goal is to work backwards towards some kind of useful synthesis. This might ultimately enable an improved design that is on the one hand low cost and incremental, but on the other hand really does move the needle in a practical sense, from the user's perspective. Broad knowledge of modern CPU architectures, compilers, storage and filesystem issues, OS internals, etc. Also knowledgeable about general purpose data structures and algorithms.