Sharding Postgres without extensions with PgDog founder, Lev Kokotov

Why watch

Aaron Francis interviews Lev Kokotov, founder of PgDog, about building an open-source Postgres sharding proxy that sits outside the database. They discuss the technical challenges of sharding, why Lev chose to build PgDog as a standalone tool rather than a Postgres extension, and the architecture behind query parsing and cross-shard operations. The conversation covers PgCat (the predecessor), the YC application process, and practical approaches to sharding existing large Postgres databases. Database engineers and architects looking to scale PostgreSQL will find this valuable.