3. Spreading the Database Love

Brendon Murphy, CTO of Kajabi, talks about his company's experience with Dataclips [1]. Instead of requiring developers to connect to their database, everyone in the company is able to generate analytics on-the-fly, and they even democratize the information via a Slackbot. Their marketing team is able to get real-time feedback on their campaigns through Lita.io [2]

The advantage of using Dataclips dovetails with their preference for using Heroku in general. While they could build their own wrapper to communicate with Postgres, or even manage their own infrastructure, they've found that the financial and operational costs are simply not worth it. By offloading this vital work, they free themselves up to focus on building features for their users.

Brendon concludes by talking about Postgres, and why it's the right choice for his team. It can act as a NoSQL document store via its JSONB data type, serve as a key-value store obviating the need for Redis, and comes with strict type assurances reducing the need for checks in the software layer. He also mentions add-ons provided by Heroku, such as PGBouncer [3], along with his feature request for how Heroku can better serve Kajabi's large data needs.

Links from this episode

1. Sharing Query Results with Dataclips
2. Lita.io chat bot
3. Heroku buildpack: pgbouncer