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DBGorilla and NetApp: two jobs, two owners
NetApp Instaclustr for PostgreSQL owns operating the database. DBGorilla owns the queries, migrations and schema changes that go into it.
Stephen Nolan | Co-Founder and COO, DBGorilla·
I spent last week at NetApp INSIGHT, where we announced the partnership between NetApp and DBGorilla. NetApp explains the partnership in Keep your engineers working on the roadmap, not the database.
Running PostgreSQL has always meant two jobs. The first is operating the database: provisioning, patching, upgrades, backups, replication and failover. The second is handling the application’s queries, migrations and schema changes. Most teams have relied on the same overloaded people to handle both jobs.
AI made the second job much bigger. A developer who used to open a pull request or two a day now opens far more. An assistant that is fluent in SQL and has never been paged at 3am writes a large share of that code.
NetApp Instaclustr for PostgreSQL owns the first job as a managed service. DBGorilla owns the second. It catches the query that will fall back to a full table scan and the migration that will hold a lock long enough to block writes. It proves the fix on a clone before anything touches production. DBGorilla is read-only and advisory; your engineer approves the change.
DBGorilla connects to an Instaclustr-managed PostgreSQL database and combines Instaclustr’s monitoring data with database signals. Developers get the same context in Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and any MCP-enabled editor. DBGorilla can also review pull requests in CI before merge.
Each job now has an owner, so nothing falls between them.