Google tells database devs to lean hard on AI for PostgreSQL work

Google is encouraging its database developers to lean "heavily" on AI coding tools as it ramps up contributions to open source projects such as PostgreSQL. Earlier this year, Google announced a raft of new contributions to PostgreSQL, the open source database that has become a popular RDBMS for developers building new applications in the cloud. Sailesh Krishnamurthy, VP of Databases, Google Cloud, told The Register that the company was using AI coding tools to accelerate its contributions to open source database systems, although each developer remains responsible for their individual contributions. "We do encourage folks to use AI heavily ," he said. "We are seeing huge amounts of productivity improvements internally. In the end, we have individual engineers take accountability for our contributions. Whether you have a piece of code that is completely drafted by AI, or not even part of what you're pasting into your development environment, you have a whole spectrum where AI is used in different places. Either way, the accountability remains on behalf of the person who's done it." AI coding tools can be especially suited to developing contributions to open source projects because the codebase is publicly available and has been used to train the generative models, he said. "That's how models have a better sense of the code, as opposed to many proprietary pieces of code, which are inside the firewall." PostgreSQL was designed to be extensible. As such, it can be a system well suited to vibe coding to get new ideas off the ground quickly, Krishnamurthy said. "The sweet spot is where you have maybe an interesting academic idea that is well understood, and you have a codebase that's well understood, and you're trying to say, well, I want to take this idea and I want to take this piece of code and build an extension for it. That's a great example where you have something isolated - the blast radius is small - and you can go and use AI to interpret the code. Our own engineers are using AI quite heavily, but also judiciously." PostgreSQL became the most popular database among developers in 2023, according to the Stack Overflow survey. The trend owes a great deal to the plethora of PostgreSQL database services out there, not least from the big three cloud providers, which have ramped up investment in the open source system. Last year, Microsoft contributed pg_documentdb_core, a custom PostgreSQL extension that enables support for Binary JavaScript Object Notation (BSON, a binary-encoded serialization of JSON documents), and pg_documentdb_api, a data layer providing MongoDB-compatible commands for create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations, queries, and index management. The extensions are set to run on the Azure Cosmos DB PostgreSQL database service and offer a document-store-style database to rival MongoDB. Microsoft has also announced a distributed PostgreSQL database service called HorizonDB. Krishnamurthy said: "The industry at large is investing heavily in PostgreSQL. We see this across the board, whether it's customers, whether it's digital native services, and certainly we see the migrations coming from commercial databases. It is also a broad industry trend of PostgreSQL as a layer, no matter where data is being stored." As such, Google has contributed new code to the project, with the engineering effort focused on advancing logical replication. Contributions included Automatic Conflict Detection, designed to allow the replication worker to automatically detect when an incoming change (Insert, Update, or Delete) conflicts with the local state; and logical replication of sequences. Demand for PostgreSQL services is coming from migrations as well as new applications, Krishnamurthy said. Customers are ditching Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM Db2, as well as other legacy systems, including Sybase and Informix. Research from Gartner earlier this year shows that of the leading database vendors 15 years ago - Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP - only Microsoft has grown its market share since. As well as its own database systems, Microsoft offers PostgreSQL and MySQL services, as does AWS, the leading database vendor. Oracle remains third, ahead of Google, and that position seems unlikely to change soon. Nonetheless, with all the major cloud vendors contributing to open source database projects such as PostgreSQL, momentum is slowly shifting. (R)