Agents in the database (Interview) - The Changelog Recap

Podcast: The Changelog

Published: 2025-12-18

Duration: 1 hr 22 min

Guests: Ajay Kalkarney

Summary

Ajay Kulkarni of Tiger Data discusses the evolution from Timescale to Tiger Data, focusing on the implementation of Agentic Postgres. The conversation highlights how founder values shape company culture and the emergence of AI as a transformative force in database management.

What Happened

Ajay Kulkarni, co-founder and CEO of Tiger Data, traces his career path from Wall Street to tech startups, emphasizing the importance of founder values in shaping company culture. He highlights how the transition from Timescale to Tiger Data reflects a broader capability beyond time series databases, including AI support. Kulkarni recounts how a custom-built database for time series data became more appealing to clients than the IoT platform that initially defined the company. This realization led to a strategic pivot, resulting in a rebranding to Tiger Data to encompass their expanded offerings.

The episode delves into the revolutionary concept of Agentic Postgres, which represents a shift in the database industry from traditional enterprise sales to a modern SaaS and product-led growth model. Kulkarni explains how the integration of AI agents into databases is transforming management tasks, allowing for faster execution from idea to deployment. The conversation explores the potential of AI agents in enhancing developer productivity, drawing parallels to how bicycles augment human mobility.

Kulkarni emphasizes the importance of leaning into one's strengths, advising against trying to shore up weaknesses. This philosophy is mirrored in Tiger Data's internal culture, which includes unique 'Tiger' themed elements such as 'tiger time' for meetings and 'tiger cubs' for new employees. The company employs a cooperative overlapping management style, where interruption is encouraged as a form of engagement.

The discussion highlights the role of Tiger CLI, a command-line interface written in Go, which provides a unified control plane for databases on Tiger Cloud. This tool includes features like starting, stopping, and forking databases, integrating seamlessly with Postgres and Timescale documentation for semantic search.

Ajay Kulkarni reflects on the historical difficulty of starting tech companies before the advent of cloud services like AWS, likening it to the democratization of photography by smartphones. He notes that the shift from on-premise to cloud and now to CLI interfaces is a revolutionary change in the industry.

The episode also covers the coding assistance capabilities of Augment Code's CLI tool, Augie, which is praised for its context engine and ability to integrate into various parts of the development workflow. This aligns with the broader trend of AI tools acting as companions to developers, rather than replacements.

With a workforce of around 170 people, Tiger Data focuses on providing a reliable and cost-effective database solution built on Postgres. The company is advancing its MCP and CLI capabilities while developing a new storage layer called Fluid Storage for ephemeral forks.

Ajay Kulkarni concludes by discussing the impact of AI on software development, predicting that a majority of new software in the coming year will be written by AI. This marks a significant shift in the industry, highlighting the transformative potential of AI agents in the database sector.

Key Insights