About Dimitri Fontaine

Dimitri, picture by Oleg Bartunov

I am a PostgreSQL developer, author, and open-source builder based near Paris. Most of what I have done professionally for the past twenty-plus years has orbited around PostgreSQL — writing code for the database itself, building tools on top of it, teaching it, and occasionally starting or running companies around it.

PostgreSQL Core

I am a PostgreSQL Major Contributor. Two features I wrote ship in every PostgreSQL installation:

Extensions — the packaging system that lets you distribute and install add-ons for PostgreSQL. CREATE EXTENSION is mine. Before extensions, third-party modules required patching the source tree; now they are first-class citizens of the ecosystem.

Event Triggers — DDL-level triggers that fire on schema changes, giving you programmatic control over CREATE TABLE, DROP INDEX, and the rest of the DDL vocabulary.

As a Debian maintainer, I helped build apt.postgresql.org together with Christoph Berg and Magnus Hagander — the repository that has kept every supported PostgreSQL version installable on every supported Debian and Ubuntu release for well over a decade.

Open Source Tools

The Projects page has the full list, but the main ones:

pgloader has been around since 2005. It loads data into PostgreSQL — and migrates whole databases from MySQL, SQLite, or MS SQL with a single command. It was originally Python, then rewritten in Common Lisp for real concurrency, and is now moving to Clojure.

pgcopydb copies an entire PostgreSQL database to another server in parallel, with change-data-capture support for near-zero-downtime migrations. The kind of tool you reach for when pg_dump | pg_restore is too slow or too blunt.

pg_auto_failover automates failover and high availability for PostgreSQL around a simple monitor node — no external consensus cluster, no zoo of processes to manage.

el-get predates MELPA as an Emacs package manager. It installs packages from anywhere — GitHub, EmacsWiki, tarballs — with full dependency resolution.

Career

If you have read Charity Majors on the Engineer/Manager Pendulum, there is something to that in how things have gone for me — from PostgreSQL hacking to running small companies and back to engineering.

I have started several companies with open-source at the core, spent time as CTO and CEO, then moved back into a principal engineering role. I spent a number of years at 2ndQuadrant doing PostgreSQL consulting and development, then joined Citus Data to work on distributed PostgreSQL and build pg_auto_failover — Citus was acquired by Microsoft in 2019.

The Book

I wrote The Art of PostgreSQL for application developers who want to get serious about SQL. The premise is that most developers are leaving enormous query power on the floor — not because PostgreSQL is hard, but because nobody showed them what it can actually do. The book, the self-paced courses, the workshops, and The Lab all come from the same place: twenty years of watching people underuse a database that could do most of their heavy lifting.

A good place to start on this blog is Understanding Window Functions, part of the data-driven YeSQL series.