Faculty · F · 06 · Faculty

Farah Naidu

Database engineer at Neon · ex-Postgres committer

You don't really understand databases until you've built a small one yourself.

At Lattice sinceCohort III · MMXXIV

Office hoursWed · 14:00 CET

Based inBerlin · Hyderabad (origin)

01 — Expertise

Areas of practice.

A non-exhaustive list of what Farah works on, has shipped, or has very strong opinions about.

databases Postgres internals B-trees WAL MVCC isolation levels query planners storage engines logical replication

02 — Currently

Working on.

I've read every released version of the Postgres source code since 9.4. I committed to mainline Postgres for four years. Today I work on Neon's storage engine and teach Database Internals at Lattice.

What I teach is, very simply, how databases actually work. We build a tiny key-value store with a B-tree on disk, then add a write-ahead log, then add MVCC, then add a query planner. By the end of week eight, students can explain SQL isolation levels without metaphors and read PostgreSQL's source without panic.

I maintain a teaching fork of Postgres that exists only for this purpose — a stripped-down version with most optimizations removed, so the core ideas are visible. Real Postgres is too good at what it does to be a good teacher.

I write the lab code three weeks before each cohort starts, because I want it to feel like I'm discovering it alongside the students. Sometimes I am.

03 — Teaches