Peter Geoghegan
Senior PostgreSQL Engineer, RDS Open Source at PostgreSQL Global Development Group
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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SeniorPeter Geoghegan is a Senior PostgreSQL Engineer with 15+ years of deep experience building and optimizing the PostgreSQL core, now contributing to RDS Open Source at AWS. A major PostgreSQL committer since the 9.2 cycle, he authored high-impact features like UPSERT and group commit improvements, and engineered order-of-magnitude speedups in sorting via abbreviated keys. His work spans B-tree index internals, VACUUM, concurrency control, logging/recovery, and memory allocation, with a practical talent for low-cost, incremental designs that materially improve user performance. Peter combines broad systems knowledge—CPUs, compilers, filesystems and OS internals—with a research-aware habit of tracing historical design choices to synthesize better solutions. Active across commercial and community projects (including the official postgres Git mirror), he’s known for pragmatic code quality, thorough review, and occasional advocacy and tooling contributions such as amcheck.
15 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (12)
databases10
query-optimization10
postgresql10
optimisation10
database10
database-optimization10
optimization10
c119
c179
locking8
data-structures8
data-structure8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
postgres/postgres
Jun 2018 - Jan 2023
Mirror of the official PostgreSQL GIT repository. Note that this is just a *mirror* - we don't work with pull requests on github. To contribute, please see https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Submitting_a_Patch
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer / Database Administrator
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer / Database AdministratorContributions:502 commits in 4 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Peter primarily focused on modifying and optimizing the PostgreSQL database core code, specifically within the B-tree index access method. Their contributions involved fixing bugs related to index tuple deletion and improving the efficiency of index scans by addressing aspects like page space management and the performance of backward scans. They also made changes to the database's internals, such as memory allocation, to improve database performance.
patchgit-repositorypull-requestspostgrespostgresql
petergeoghegan/amcheck
Apr 2016 - Sep 2021
Functions for verifying PostgreSQL relation integrity
Contributions:10 releases, 70 commits, 11 PRs in 5 years 5 months
pgpostgresql-extensionintegritypostgrespostgresql
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