Anand Rao is a PostgreSQL and Lakebase evangelist with a practitioner-first approach: he builds on the technology he advocates for, and his advocacy grows out of that work. He has spent multiple decades on both sides of the data aisle, on OLTP systems where a slow query becomes an outage and on OLAP platforms where the question is how much data you can reason over. As a Lakebase Field Specialist at Databricks, he works hands-on with engineering teams putting PostgreSQL at the center of their AI applications and agentic systems, using transactions, schemas, indexes, and extensions to solve problems the AI tooling ecosystem too often answers with bespoke infrastructure. He came to Postgres from the application side, and he still considers that the most useful vantage point on a database. He is the author of Lakebase Live, a running showcase of more than 25 hands-on journeys in which the case for Postgres and Lakebase is made by a working system rather than a set of claims. He previously held engineering roles at Chainalysis, and VMware, and he built a showcase of custom App development on Databricks' Lakewatch  from the ground up, presenting it at Databricks Data + AI Summit 2026. He holds an MS in Computer and Information Sciences from Northeastern University.