Floor Drees

May 26, 2025 • 2 minutes

Building and maintaining an open source project takes a village. In a mini-series on this blog we would like to highlight the work of our maintainers, component owners, and members of the larger community.

This week the spotlight shines on David Wheeler, or: theory, Principal Architect at Tembo, and PGXN maintainer. You might have heard of David’s work on pgTAP, a suite of database functions that make it easy to write TAP-emitting unit tests in psql scripts or xUnit-style test functions. Or Sqitch, the database change management application. He’s also the “bull- headed guy who ported SQL/JSON Path to Go” (Playground). The man keeps busy…

He’s not quite sure where he first heard about CloudNativePG; maybe at a PGConf? “I was kind of aware of it as a thing when I started at Tembo, which is where I actually got to know it.”

His first formal contributions to the project were documentation improvements: defining RPO and RTO. David also advocated for the extension search path patch, a game-changing… change!

On his list of improvements he wishes for in CloudNativePG: “I’d like to get the Postgres core and CloudNativePG to the point where extensions can be ‘installed’ via immutable Docker images without requiring cluster configuration changes (and a service restart)!”

David first got into Tech building web pages for himself and fellow grad students that anyone on the internet could look at in NCSA Mosaic, anywhere in the world. It checks out then when he next shares that he has “no intention of growing up”, and that he’d like his legacy to be that he inspired people through empathy, compassion, creativity, and passion.

David is a member of several communities, including but not limited to the XOXO Festival, the Rands Leadership Slack, and of course the Postgres community. He’s also himself building quite a community around the Postgres tooling ecosystem, organizing virtual and in-person events to discuss the current state and future of Postgres extension registration, packaging, and distribution. Keep an eye on https://justatheory.com/ so you don’t miss out on any of the fun!

You can find David in the CloudNativePG channels on the CNCF Slack workspace, or on Mastodon or Bluesky.