Every major cloud vendor now offers an enhanced, opinionated PostgreSQL-compatible database management system (DBMS), based on either proprietary extensions, sharding middleware, or a completely new system. These moves make PostgreSQL the de facto database choice for modern applications. Against this backdrop, the remaining non-PostgreSQL systems resemble a surreal resistance movement: like a 55-year-old man who wakes up inexplicably pregnant, they find themselves burdened with a challenging condition. Such a man must struggle to understand how to move forward with their life, just as alternative databases now struggle to overcome an ecosystem that assumes Postgres semantics, tooling, and mindshare by default. The tale is absurd, unsettling, and darkly comic, but it captures the current reality.
The Carnegie Mellon University Database Research Group is exploring this question with the PostgreSQL vs. The World Seminar Series. The talks in this series will alternate between PostgreSQL-compatible DBMSs and alternative DBMSs that address problems PostgreSQL may not be well-suited to solve.
https://db.cs.cmu.edu/seminars/spring2026/
Videos in this playlist 12
Redpanda Oxla or: Why Your Hashmaps are Secretly Wrecking Your Performance (Akidau + Symanski)
Aurora DSQL: Serverless, Scalable, Global OLTP Database System (Marc Brooker)
TopK: Billion-Scale Hybrid Retrieval from the Ground Up (Marek Galovic)
HorizonDB: Co‑Designing PostgreSQL and Azure for Cloud‑Native OLTP (Adam Prout)
turbopuffer: Object Storage-native Database for Search (Simon Eskildsen)
YugabyteDB: Distributed PostgreSQL for Modern Apps (Hari Krishna Sunder)
TonicDB: Databases without an OS? Meet QuinineHM (Filip Obradovic)
Pixeltable: A DBMS for Multimodal AI Applications (Marcel Kornacker)
SpacetimeDB → Inverting the Backend: Why We Built our MMORPG Inside a Database (Tyler Cloutier)
Multigres: Bringing Horizontal Scaling and Enterprise Operations to PostgreSQL (Sugu Sougoumarane)
VillageSQL: Decisions, Principles, & Lessons in Teaching MySQL New Tricks (Steve Schirripa)
Sirius: A GPU-Native SQL Engine (Xiangyao Yu)
Advantages and disadvantages
Advantages
Free and complete: every lecture is in the playlist, in order.
Watch at 1.5x, skip what you know, rewatch what you don't.
Taught by Carnegie Mellon University, one of the strongest names in its field.
Completely free.
Self-paced: start any time.
A clear syllabus (12 videos) you can see before you start.
Start watching right away, no sign-up.
Disadvantages
No certificate, deadlines or graded work.
Quality and depth vary: check that the playlist is finished before you start.
No certificate.
No graded assignments or feedback.
Some points apply to every course of this kind; see how we rank.
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