Postgres Expands Its Reach

(MZinchenko/Shutterstock)

The big data age has brought no shortage of exotic data stores: graph databases, globally distributed file systems, and geospatial and time-series databases. And yet, through it all, it’s PostgreSQL–the humble, 25-year-old relational database–with all the momentum right now. And with the launch of version 15, Postgres stands to get even better.

Postgres is still lodged in the number four spot on DB-Engines.com’s list of the most popular databases, the same position it occupied in October 2021. Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server still have a bigger reach than Postgres, according to the DB-Engines ranking (which is based on website mentions, Google searches, jobs, etc.)

But over the past 12 months, only Snowflake’s analytics database has logged a bigger jump in popularity than Postgres, the free and open source relational database that was first conceived by computer scientists Mike Stonebraker as a successor to Ingres, which he also created. Stonebraker would go on to win the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2014 for his serial entrepreneurship and contributions to the relational database field.

But Postgres was just getting started when Stonebraker won that award, as its popularity has nearly tripled since then, according to the DB-Engines metric. And in the past year, demand for Postgres has gone into overdrive, thanks to its secure foundation, extensibility, and community-driven development.

Postgres is rising in popularity, according to DB-Engines.com

Postgres’ booming popularity has led all three hyperscalers to solidify their own hosted Postgres offerings. In 2021, AWS said its Postgres-compatible database service, dubbed Amazon Aurora, was the fastest growing product in the history of the AWS. Why? “It works,” AWS’s VP for Relational Databases Jeff Carter told Datanami last year.

In May, Google Cloud launched a new PostgreSQL compatible database, dubbed AlloyDB. Google Cloud couldn’t ignore the widespread demand for Postgres in its market. “It’s really going through a huge renaissance in the market and huge growth,” Andi Gutmans, the vice president and general manager of databases at Google Cloud, said in April.

Now Microsoft Azure is getting in on the Postgres act with Cosmos DB, its hosted database service. At its Ignite 2022 conference last week, the cloud giant announced general availability of–you guessed it–a Postgres-compatible database service. In addition to offering developers access to both NoSQL and Postgres interface with a single database, Azure is also available as a distributed PostgreSQL database via extensions offered by its partner, Citus Data.

“With our service for PostgreSQL, you can start building your apps on a single node server group, the same way you would with PostgreSQL,” Citus Data’s Umur Cubukcu and Ozgun Erdogan write in an Azure blog post. “As your app’s scalability and performance requirements grow, you can enable distributed tables and seamlessly scale to multiple nodes.”

That’s one way to bolster Postgres’ performance. Another one is to just upgrade to version 15, which officially hit release candidate 1 (RC 1) status last week. The new version brings enhancements to in-memory and on-disk sorting algorithms that will see those tasks get a 25% to 400% increase in performance, depending on data types, according to the Postgres development team.

Postgres 15 also gets a new MERGE SQL command, which will make it easier for organizations to migrate their data from other databases to Postgres. Considering the large migration of databases to the cloud at the moment, this function is likely to see quite a bit of usage.

The security story gets better on Postgres 15 with the launch of role-based permissions for commands that previously required superuser permissions. Backups should also speed up with this release, thanks to new server-side backup compression algorithms. And new data replication capabilities originally developed by EntepriseDB for the enterprise version of Postgres are now available in version 15 of the open source database.

“Our focus is to continue making Postgres an extraordinary database, superior to legacy systems and more broadly applicable than specialty databases,” Marc Linster, CTO of EDB, said in a press release. “Postgres 15 represents our continued commitment to remaining the leader of Postgres innovation while delivering technology that directly benefits our enterprise customers running mission-critical applications.”

EnterpriseDB says Postgres 15 will be available on October 20 as beta on EDB BigAnimal, its fully managed database-as-a-service.

Who’s Winning the Cloud Database War

Distributed PostgreSQL Settling Into Cloud

10 Rules for Managing PostgreSQL