Introduction:

My name is Hettie Dombrovskaya, and I has been doing databases and data management since the very beginning of my professional career, which is now forty-two years long! You can say, I started doing databases even before databases. I graduated with BS in CS in 1985 from the University of Saint Petersburg, and received a PhD in CS from the same University in 1995. Although I was exposed to the University Postgres in the early 1990s, I didn’t use Postgres on industrial scale until 2011. By that time, I worked with five major databases, strongly preferring Oracle, and I was sure that Postgres was something I was going to do “temporarily.” Yet, three months later, I fall in love with Postgres and never looked back. My current role in the Postgres community is to run around and tell people what’s wrong with Postgres and how we can make it better. On a more serious note, I frequently speak at Postgres conferences and organize training sessions. For the past three years, I was an organizer of PG Day Chicago, and I ran Chicago PostgreSQL User Group for nine years. Last year, together with Dian Fay and Anna Bailliekova, I founded Prairie Postgres NFP – a recognized Postgres NPO, serving Midwest States of the USA. We focus on growing local Postgres community and outreach to software engineers and academia. Former Chicago PUG is rebranded as Illinois PostgreSQL User Group, and we just announced PG DATA 2026: a new Postgres Conference in Chicago.

Journey in PostgreSQL:

As I mentioned, I was all about databases from the start of my career, and was exposed to many DBMSs in the 1980s- 1990s, including writing a simple database on Perl for one of the Open Source project. Being a university researcher, I dipped my toe into University Postgres in 1990s, but I considered it being a purely academic exercise. Everything changed in 2011, when I got a job as Postgres DBA knowing nothing about it. The hiring manager told me: we know that you do not know Postgres, but to be honest, nobody knows Postgres. We know you are a good DBA, and that’s enough. As I learned later, that was very far from the truth – Postgres appeared to be drastically different from anything I knew before, but once started, I could not think about going back.

Can you share a pivotal moment or project in your PostgreSQL career that has been particularly meaningful to you?

Each new project I ever started was meaningful in terms I learned something new and tried things I never tried before, but the most meaningful by far was my work at Braviant Holdings. By the time I started at Braviant, I already had a well-recognized name, but I never was in a position where I was literally “in charge of everything.” I was the sixth company employee, and the first and only IT person for some time, and from day one, I had to make important technical decisions, which would define the company’s future development. That was the first time in my career when I had nobody backing me up. I had to take full responsibility for my decisions, and I realized that I like it, that it’s not “just job,” but way more than that.

Contributions and Achievements:

I support several projects, all of them can be found in my GitHub repo https://github.com/hettie-d. pg_bitemporal is a set of functions which implement AVF – asserted versioning framework, otherwise called dimensional time. I hope that Postgres will incorporate these features into its core soon, and I will be able to retire it. NORM is a framework which can be used by application developers instead of ORMs, supporting bulk operations and transferring complex nested objects between Postgres database and Object-oriented applications. And lastly, my most popular project which I consider my biggest contribution, is postgres_air – the largest publicly-available Postgres training database. We developed the first version of this database together with Boris Novikov when we worked on the first edition of “PostgreSQL Query Optimization” book. We wanted to build real-world examples for the book, and we realized that there was no publicly available database that would be large enough to illustrate the optimization concepts.

Have you faced any challenges in your work with PostgreSQL, and how did you overcome them?

The biggest challenge was my first encounter with Postgres. As I mentioned, I already had twenty-eight years of database experience, fifteen of them being with Oracle. I was sure I know everything about databases, and if I can optimize queries and applications in Oracle, no other database would be a problem. I appeared to be very far from the truth. I was shocked to find out that almost nothing from my previous knowledge was applicable, and things didn’t work with Postgres how they worked with Oracle. Remembering how I learned to tame Postgres the hard way, i want to make sure that other newcomers have less traumatic experience. That was one of the biggest drivers for PostgreSQL Query Optimization book.

Community Involvement:

Postgres community is the most exciting and most valuable part of Postgres. That was one of the first things I found about Postgres, and that’s what I like the most: hundreds of people ready to help! My community involvement is listed in the intro, copying it here for consistency. For the past three years, I was an organizer of PG Day Chicago, and I ran Chicago PostgreSQL User Group for nine years. Last year, together with Dian Fay and Anna Bailliekova, we founded Prairie Postgres NFP (https://prairiepostgres.org/)- a recognized Postgres NPO, serving Midwest States of the USA. We focus on growing local Postgres community and outreach to software engineers and academia. Former Chicago PUG is rebranded Illinois PostgreSQL User Group, and we just announced PG DATA 2026(2026.pg-data.org) a new Postgres Conference in Chicago.

Can you share your experience with mentoring or supporting other women in the PostgreSQL ecosystem?

I believe that the most critical part of supporting women as well as other underrepresented groups is the outreach. It is not enough to say: please reach out if you need support. It is important to make the first move. Sadly, there are multiple stereotypes regarding the women’s role in IT. For example, I remember heading to a company-wide meeting in a big company, where not everyone knew everyone. During the brief introductions on the way to the meeting, somebody asked me and two other women: and you are QA, aren’t you? Unfortunately, many women fall into the same stereotype the tech society imposes, and believe that a woman in IT can only be a QA engineer, or a scrum master, or a PM. I try to reach out to women who never considered the knowledge of Postgres being an assert, and I invite them to attend conferences. I encourage women to submit their proposals to Postgres conferences, even when they never tried it before. I am always happy to do a mock interview, or to listen to a presentation dry run. It’s not enough to say “you are doing great!” Constructive criticism is vital for professional development.

.Insights and Advice:

I have a blog post about it: https://hdombrovskaya.wordpress.com/2025/01/29/career-success-in-tech-as-a-single-mother-forget-the-stereotypesaa-copy-of-my-post-on-elpha/

Feel free to copy or share the whole post

Are there any resources (books, courses, forums) you’d recommend to someone looking to deepen their PostgreSQL knowledge?

I can use an opportunity for a shameless self-promotion here: https://www.amazon.com/PostgreSQL-Query-Optimization-Ultimate-Efficient/dp/B0CK5GWWQ1

Jimmy Angelakos book “PostgreSQL Mistakes and How to Avoid Them” is about to be published my Manning Publications. I was a technical reviewer for this book, and I can’t say enough about how great this book is! For application developers, I highly recommend High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails by Andrew Atkinson: https://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-PostgreSQL-Rails-Maintainable/dp/B0CX876RLY

Most importantly, attend conferences, read blogs, participate in your local meetups! And don’t hesitate to ask!

.Looking Forward:

For the upcoming Postgres 18, I am mostly excited about the first portion of temporal tables support finally making it into Postgres core! Also, as usual, I am excited about multiple performance improvements. In the future, I am really looking forward for yet better support of partitions. Also, I hope to convince somebody that Postgres needs packages!

Do you have any upcoming projects or goals within the PostgreSQL community that you can share?

Since October 2024, my focus in my community activities has been growing Prairie Postgres. I hope to build Postgres community in the Greater Midwest, to have several PostgreSQL User Groups in the neighboring states, not just in Chicago!

Personal Reflection:

PostgreSQL community literally made me the person I am now. Just to think that I could never dive into Postgres, and continue to be an Oracle DBA! I wouldn’t even know how much I missed! I can only compare the importance of Postgres to the importance of my move to the USA: if I wouldn’t move, I would never know what I missed. Working with Postgres and being a part of Postgres community sparked innovation and creativity in me like nothing else. The support I always had from the community at large was vital for my professional growth.

How do you balance your professional and personal life, especially in a field that is constantly evolving?

I like the phrase I first heard from Dr. Sun “There is no work-life balance, it is work-life integration”. More in the article I shared above.

Message to the Community:

When I attended my first Postgres Conference in 2012, i felt intimidated. I didn’t understand most of the talks, and I felt that everyone around me knew tons more than I. So, my message is the following: if you feel similarly, you are not alone! It’s OK to feel like that. Two years later, I came to a conference check-in, and everyone knew me by name, and I was wondering when did this transformation happen. Listen. Ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask “a dumb question,” and don’t pretend you understand something if you didn’t. Ask to explain. Nobody will laugh at you, and you will learn something.