Conversation about Autonomous PostgreSQL: Vibhor Kumar

I recently sat down with Vibhor Kumar to discuss Autonomous PostgreSQL. Vibhor is a Vice President in EDB's customer experience organization, the co-author of AI-Ready PostgreSQL 18, and of the PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook. He has spent well over a decade guiding Fortune 500 companies away from restrictive legacy software and into highly scalable open-source environments.

Watch the full interview above — here are a few of my notes and key takeaways.

We started our conversation by discussing the problems Vibhor sees in the field, especially those resulting from the increased use of object-relational mapping (ORM) tools like Django and the growing use of AI-assisted vibe coding.

Vibhor mentioned five key problems that he sees in the field:

• Use of default configurations in production: users keep using the default, out-of-the-box configurations, even though they are known to be suboptimal.
• Lack of index strategies: code is added incrementally, and nobody owns a coherent index strategy.
• Auto-vacuum starvation: table design isn't centrally managed, leading to table bloat and vacuum strategies that cannot keep up with demand.
• Vibe-coded schemas: No one owns the schema; it grows incrementally as part of the vibe coding process.
• AI-driven query volume: AI-generated code creates many new queries; there is little reuse and no focus on complexity management.

When I asked whether AI should act on the database autonomously, Vibhor proposed a very interesting three-level framework defined by blast radius and reversibility. AI should autonomously handle actions with low potential to do harm and that can be easily reversed. However, humans must be involved in decision-making and execution when decisions become more impactful and harder to reverse.

The last part of the conversation focused on where we should focus next to make PostgreSQL more autonomous. Vibhor sees closed-loop observability, AI-native workload awareness, and AI-driven governance as the next opportunities.

It was a fascinating conversation. Listen to the video to get all the nuances and details.

This was the fifth in a series of interviews about Autonomous PostgreSQL. Earlier interviews were with Luigi Nardi, CEO and founder of DBtune; Bruce Momjian, VP, Postgres Evangelist at EDB; Magnus Hagander, Principal Database Consultant at Redpill Linpro and President of PostgreSQL Europe; and Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of Percona.

If you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions for future interviews, please contact us at autonomouspostgresql@dbtune.com.