Interview with credativ
Find out more about credativ
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not neccessarily represent those of the PGDay Lowlands 2026 organisation, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
Describe your company in brief and tell us how its core values align
with those of the Postgres community.
Since 1999, credativ GmbH has been dedicated exclusively to open-source software, providing 24/7/365 operational support, consulting, and migration services for enterprise IT infrastructures. Our core values mirror those of the PostgreSQL community: a deep commitment to digital sovereignty, vendor independence, transparency, and collaborative engineering.
We believe organizations should retain full control over their technology and data without being bound by proprietary vendor lock-in. We don't just consume free software, but actively support its ecosystem by employing active contributors, sharing real-world migration strategies, and helping businesses achieve true independence on top of reliable, open-source solutions.
Does your company have a product built on top of PostgreSQL? What makes
it stand out?
credativ GmbH offers the PostgreSQL Competence Center: a comprehensive, end-to-end service solution covering the complete lifecycle of PostgreSQL in enterprise environments. What makes it unique is our transparent, flexible support model: 24/7/365 access to senior database experts without artificial lock-in or licensing fees based on CPU counts, core numbers, or active users. From high-availability setups, clustering, and performance tuning to custom monitoring and complex migrations, our service delivers full enterprise confidence on top of pure open-source PostgreSQL.
What do your employees say about your company, what makes them happy?
Our team appreciates the intersection of high-level professional work and a genuine passion for open source. credativ offers hybrid and fully remote flexibility alongside our modern office in Mönchengladbach, which serves as a community hub for tech meetups and knowledge sharing. Employees love our continuous learning culture, driven by regular knowledge sharing, internal training, and active conference participation. Paired with ISO-certified operational quality, sustainable perks like EV charging, and a collaborative environment built on free software principles, credativ provides a truly fulfilling workplace.
Name the most valuable contributions that your company has shared with
the community? What makes each of them special?
credativ has historically played a key role in building and maintaining the Debian/Ubuntu PostgreSQL packaging infrastructure (apt.postgresql.org), making Postgres easily accessible to Linux deployments worldwide. More recently, we developed credativ-pg-migrator as an open-source tool to help the community seamlessly migrate schema and data from other database engines to PostgreSQL. Beyond code and packaging, our experts, such as Michael Banck, regularly contribute expertise through community talks. We also guide clients through open-source hypervisor transitions (e.g. Proxmox VE) and performance optimization strategies.
Which PostgreSQL extension is of most value to your company? Why and how
you leverage it?
The extension of most value to our daily operations is unquestionably pg_stat_statements. As a PostgreSQL consultancy managing complex, high-load production environments, rapid observability is critical. We leverage pg_stat_statements to diagnose workload bottlenecks, analyze query performance trends, identify missing indexes, and fine-tune database performance for our clients without adding heavy operational overhead to their production systems.
What is your team's most anticipated feature in the next major release
of PostgreSQL and why?
PostgreSQL 19 will have several great new features especially for DBAs, including online checksum enabling and REPACK CONCURRENTLY. However, what we are most thrilled about are the upcoming pg_plan_advice and pg_stash_advice modules. They allow for plan stabilization and introduce optimizer hints to PostgreSQL core for the first time. Our colleague Michael Banck will talk about this in his PGDay Lowlands talk, "Optimizer Hints in PostgreSQL".
