Modular Databases: We Put Postgres in package.json
Presented by:
Dan Lynch
Dan Lynch is a serial entrepreneur, builder, and web architect with multiple exits. While earning two EECS degrees from UC Berkeley, he founded several no-code and web infrastructure companies backed by Marc Benioff, Reid Hoffman, and Naval Ravikant. His ventures include Brandcast (acquired by TIME) and Amaze/Famo.us (acquired by AMZE). Today he is the CEO of Constructive, an open-source developer stack whose tooling—used by Supabase, Vercel, Databricks and other major platforms—has surpassed 100 million downloads and powers more than 10 million Postgres databases worldwide. With three decades of experience building web infrastructure, Dan is unifying the past, present, and future of software development through Constructive’s interoperable stack.
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Modern software is built from composable, versioned modules with clear dependencies, reproducible builds, and continuous verification. Databases, despite being the most critical layer in the stack, are still developed without these guarantees—relying on fragile migration chains, manual conventions, and security rules that are difficult to test or audit.
This talk introduces a package-first approach to PostgreSQL: designing databases as interoperable modules that can be installed, versioned, composed, and tested just like application code. Using pgpm (Postgres Package Manager), database systems are assembled from explicit dependency graphs rather than linear migration history. Deterministic migrations ensure that the same module graph always produces the same schema output, eliminating order-dependent failures and making database builds reproducible across environments.
Modularity unlocks a new development workflow for Postgres. PGPM workspaces enable large systems to be developed across multiple schemas and teams while preserving isolation and composability. Core concerns—identity, tenancy, authorization, and domain logic—can be expressed as reusable modules with well-defined interfaces, allowing enterprise-scale databases to evolve safely without rewriting foundational infrastructure.
Testing becomes a first-class primitive rather than an afterthought. With SQL-native, Jest-style testing, database behavior can be validated automatically in CI/CD pipelines on every pull request. This is especially transformative for Row-Level Security (RLS) and authorization logic, which are traditionally opaque and difficult to reason about. In a modular, test-driven architecture, security policies become verifiable code with regression coverage—tested independently and in composition.
Attendees will learn practical patterns for building Postgres systems that scale with both team size and system complexity: deterministic schema builds, dependency-aware module composition, and CI-driven verification. The result is a database workflow that finally matches modern engineering standards—reproducible, testable, and safe by construction—and a foundation ready for enterprise applications and AI-driven development alike.
- Date:
- 2026 April 23 10:00 PDT
- Duration:
- 50 min
- Room:
- Winchester
- Conference:
- Postgres Conference: 2026
- Language:
- Track:
- Postgres Extensions Day
- Difficulty:
- Easy