More than a refresh: Conversations with the most interesting people you've never met

Hosted by Joshua Drake

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101

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Jun 2026

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About the show

More than a Refresh is a new podcast dedicated to learning about data and the people behind it through lively conversation, diverse topics, and engaging guest speakers. We explore professional trends within the ecosystem including trouble spots, privacy, equity, democratization, and future directions. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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60 recent

June 11, 202649 min

MTAR 57: AI, Rural America, and the Communities in Between

In this episode, JD talks with Andrew Aitken, Founder of the Center for Rural AI, about what AI adoption looks like outside major cities and tech hubs.Andrew shares how the organization is working with rural communities, higher education, municipalities, and small businesses to help people better understand and use AI tools in practical ways. The conversation includes examples ranging from local workshops in small Colorado towns to AI-assisted tools for hospitality, tourism, and accessibility.But the discussion quickly expands into larger questions around access and participation. JD and Andrew talk about broadband infrastructure, rural entrepreneurship, the cost of AI tools, and whether communities outside large urban centers will realistically be able to keep up with the speed of technological change.They also explore sovereign data, Native American communities, and the challenge of ensuring that AI systems represent people and cultures accurately instead of flattening them into generic datasets. The episode touches on ownership, equity, economic opportunity, and the growing tension between rapid AI development and the communities trying to adapt to it.This is a conversation about AI, but it’s really a conversation about access, identity, and whether the next wave of technology will widen existing gaps or help close them.📲 Andrew Aitken:https://www.linkedin.com/in/opensourcestrategy/💼 The Center for Rural AI:https://www.ruralai.org/

June 9, 202612 min

MTAR T3D Sessions: PostgreSQL Is Still Paying for Old MVCC Decisions

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, JD talks with Jonah Harris about one of PostgreSQL’s oldest and most debated architectural choices: MVCC and the storage behavior that still shapes how PostgreSQL handles updates, concurrency, and vacuum today.Jonah explains how PostgreSQL originally supported time-travel queries, allowing users to inspect historical versions of data directly, and why PostgreSQL still stores and manages data the way it does even after those original features disappeared decades ago.From there, the conversation digs into the real consequences of PostgreSQL’s MVCC model. Instead of updating rows in place, PostgreSQL continuously creates new row versions, leading to vacuum overhead, index churn, table bloat, and storage inefficiencies that engineers still fight with today. This episode goes deep into PostgreSQL internals, but at its core it’s a conversation about how long architectural decisions can shape the future of a database system long after the original reasons for them disappear.📬 Jonah Harris: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonahharris/💼 NEXTGRES: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nextgres/

June 5, 202617 min

MTAR T3D Sessions: AI Agents, SQL, and Why Context Still Matters

Welcome back to More Than a Refresh Presents: T3D Sessions.In this episode, JD talks with MotherDuck Co-Founder and CEO Jordan Tigani about how AI agents are starting to change the way teams explore and interact with data.The conversation begins with a practical question: can AI actually help business users work directly with analytics without needing to know SQL? Jordan explains why newer agent-based systems behave differently from earlier natural language query tools. Instead of generating a single query and hoping for the best, these systems can iteratively inspect tables, test joins, explore schemas, and refine answers in ways that look much closer to how a human analyst works through a problem.This episode is less about AI hype and more about the practical tension between automation, context, and how people actually use data inside real businesses.

June 2, 202611 min

MTAR T3D Sessions: Why PostgreSQL Still Hides the Data You Need

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, JD talks with Ryan Booz from PG Analyze about a problem many PostgreSQL teams run into far too late: the visibility you need often is not enabled when things start going wrong.The conversation starts with logging and query optimization, but quickly expands into a bigger discussion around PostgreSQL’s configurability and why so many critical settings still feel hidden to everyday users. Ryan explains why teams regularly discover tools like pg_stat_statements only after performance issues appear, and why troubleshooting production systems often starts with realizing the data was never being collected in the first place.JD and Ryan also discuss conservative defaults, auto-tuning, and the tension between building PostgreSQL as a general-purpose product versus running PostgreSQL in real production environments. It becomes a broader conversation about observability, operational reality, and the growing number of companies building solutions around gaps the community still debates.📬 Ryan Booz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanbooz/💼 PG Analyze: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pganalyze/

May 28, 202613 min

MTAR T3D Sessions: Why Enterprise Security Got So Complicated

In this episode, Bradon Rogers, Chief Customer Officer at Island, joins JD to break down how enterprise environments became so complex. Over the years, organizations have taken a consumer web browser and layered on proxies, VPNs, data loss prevention tools, and other controls to manage access and security.The result is a fragmented stack that works for the organization, but often creates a poor experience for the end user.Bradon explains why this approach persists and what happens when you shift the model. Instead of wrapping the browser with layers of infrastructure, the conversation explores what it looks like to move identity, context, and control directly into the browser itself, turning it into the point where application access is governed.They also touch on practical implications, like separating personal and corporate activity and simplifying how users interact with both internal and external applications.📬 Bradon Rogers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradon/💼 Island: https://www.island.io/

May 19, 202611 min

MTAR T3D Sessions: Why XIDs Are Still a Problem in Postgres

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, Justin Graf and JD take on a long-standing issue in PostgreSQL: transaction IDs (XIDs) and what happens when they wrap around. Despite years of improvements, the system still relies on a 32-bit design that forces ongoing maintenance in high-volume databases.This short session offers a practical look at why XIDs still matter and how they continue to shape performance and operations in modern Postgres environments.

May 14, 202612 min

MTAR T3D Sessions: Why Coding Alone Isn’t Enough Anymore

In this episode, Joris Kuipers, CTO and hands-on architect, joins JD to talk about what it really means to grow as an engineer. As AI begins to take on more of the straightforward coding work, the conversation shifts to the skills that actually define long-term value.Joris explains why writing code is only one part of the job. Understanding customer problems, communicating effectively, and taking ownership of outcomes are what move engineers forward. The discussion also explores how to grow into leadership without losing touch with the technical side, and why that balance matters.📬 Joris Kuper: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkuipers/

May 7, 20261 hr 14 min

MTAR 56: Who Controls Security, Data, and Information?

JD and Thomas Carnevale, Founder of Umbrella Security, get into how modern security infrastructure connects to questions around control, authority, and ownership. What begins with cameras, access control, and surveillance quickly turns into a discussion about who actually decides what we can access, what gets stored, and how those systems evolve over time.They also get into the tension between protection and control. Identity verification, monitoring, and centralized systems are often framed as necessary safeguards, but they also introduce new layers of dependency and influence. It is a conversation about security, but also about control, trust, and what it means to actually own the systems you rely on.📲 Umbrella Security Systems: https://umbrellasecurity.com/

May 5, 202613 min

MTAR T3D Sessions: Why Postgres Defaults Don’t Match Reality

In this Postgres Pet Peeves episode, Greg Dostatni and JD take on a problem most teams run into early but rarely question: default configuration. PostgreSQL ships with hundreds of parameters, many of which are still based on assumptions from decades-old hardware. For new users, that doesn’t feel like flexibility, it feels like noise.Greg breaks down why this creates unnecessary complexity and why, in practice, most teams don’t need to understand all 400 settings. They need to understand the right ones. The conversation also touches on how this has become less of a technical limitation and more of a usability and community challenge over time.

April 30, 20269 min

MTAR T3D Sessions: The Hidden Cost of Default Values in Postgres

Adding a column with a default value feels like a safe change. It is fast, avoids locking, and keeps things moving. But in Postgres, that speed comes from a tradeoff that can quietly affect performance later.Brian Fehrle, Database Administrator at Command Prompt, explains how Postgres handles these defaults without writing them to disk, and why that can leave the query planner working with incomplete information.In this episode, a real production case shows how queries that were once fast suddenly slowed down after a schema change, and how fixing it required more work than expected. It is a small decision with consequences that only show up when the system is under pressure.