I host a Postgres podcast, and I recently recorded a conversation with Panos Antonopoulos, a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft who spent 13 years working on SQL Server before moving onto Postgres and HorizonDB.

Panos told me that at a high level, Postgres felt very familiar as he started to work on it, that the concepts are very similar. Transactions, storage, & more—the fundamentals transfer surprisingly well. We also covered:

• The cleanliness of the Postgres codebase.
• How LLMs are making it easier to digest years of Postgres design discussions that are publicly available on the mailing lists.
• Why Postgres has become the default answer for so many workloads, and why more people seem to be asking, "Why not Postgres?"
• Shared-storage architectures and some of the work he's doing in Azure HorizonDB.

One quote that stuck with me:

• "That was a shocking experience for me. I could understand new areas in Postgres much faster than I could for SQL."

For people who have worked across multiple database systems (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, etc.), I'm curious whether you've had a similar experience—or a completely different one.

Podcast/transcript here if anyone is interested: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/working-on-postgres-after-13-years-on-sql-server-with-panagiotis-antonopoulos