
Interested in being a guest? Email us at [email protected]
Your AI agent can write SQL in seconds. The hard part is letting it touch real data without turning production into a crime scene.
We sit down with Mike Freedman, co-founder and CTO of Tiger Data (formerly TimescaleDB) and a Princeton computer science professor, to unpack what “real-time data infrastructure” looks like now that AI agents are becoming everyday teammates. We talk about why the Timescale name started to box the company into a narrow “time series database” perception, even though many teams use Postgres as a unified operational database that combines telemetry, events, and business metadata in one place.
From there, we dig into why Postgres is having a second wave with AI: a stable, trusted core plus an extension framework that lets the ecosystem innovate with time series, PostGIS, and vector search. Mike explains why industrial data is growing faster than legacy proprietary “box in a closet” systems can handle, and why modern industrial historians separate compute and protocol layers from scalable storage so factories, power grids, and monitoring dashboards can evolve like modern software.
Then we get concrete on agentic Postgres. Agents move fast, operate in parallel, and are surprisingly strong at SQL, which raises new needs: hybrid search inside the database, safe tool calling (including MCP-style interfaces), and rapid database branching so an agent can explore a fresh snapshot of a multi-terabyte database in seconds, test ideas, and spin it down at near-zero cost. We close with what’s next for Tiger Data across cloud and edge deployments, including the rising importance of AI data centers as industrial-scale control systems, plus Mike’s advice for students building careers in a rapidly shifting AI era.
If you got value from this, subscribe, share it with a builder on your team, and leave a review with one question you want agents to answer from your data.
Learn more about Microsoft's ISOC announcement: https://fandf.co/4iQ9b5n
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Otros episodios de "What's Up with Tech?"



No te pierdas ningún episodio de “What's Up with Tech?”. Síguelo en la aplicación gratuita de GetPodcast.








