EDB Supercharges Postgres Deployments with BigAnimal Upgrades

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Riding the crest of a Postgres wave, EDB has supercharged its Postgres cloud database-as-a-service, BigAnimal.

The Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey found that Postgres is currently the preferred database for developers, and EDB aims to support Postgres users by expanding deployment options and offering greater flexibility.

EDB enterprise customers can now rapidly deploy a fully-managed Postgres cluster on any major cloud platform within their own account or through BigAnimal’s cloud account, the company says. Multiple options allow for the freedom to choose the deployment best aligned with organizational strategies and security requirements, EDB asserts.

EDB (formerly EnterpriseDB) has contributed to Postgres code for more than 15 years. Released in 2021, BigAnimal was developed to enhance cloud-based PostgreSQL performance, security, and availability, as well as to offer greater Oracle compatibility and ease of configuration compared to standard PostgreSQL implementations.

EDB’s CPO Chandler Hoisington said in a statement that enterprise leaders are increasingly embracing a diversified cloud strategy that includes a multi and hybrid cloud approach, but finding support for this approach can be challenging. “Now, with EDB BigAnimal, they can deploy their own cloud account and leverage BigAnimal’s cloud account simultaneously. With options for distributed Postgres, available in BigAnimal as a preview, and Oracle compatibility, these organizations can experience extreme high availability and ease of migration, without the hassle of having to manage it themselves. With support from the company that knows Postgres better than any other, moving to the cloud has never been easier,” he said.

There are several key features the company has highlighted in this release, including the extreme high availability afforded by EDB Postgres Distributed, now available as a preview in BigAnimal. The company claims organizations can experience up to five-nines availability with no downtime for mission-critical applications, even during upgrades. Additionally, as companies build applications in the public cloud of their choice, compatibility allows schemas from legacy applications like Oracle to be quickly migrated to Postgres.

Enhanced flexibility is the theme here, and EDB says developers looking to prove out a concept can experiment with fully-managed Postgres with BigAnimal’s cloud account before committing, and then move to production in a simple process with no complex sales contracts required. For teams with agility and secure access requirements, solutions within BigAnimal address this by removing the need to set up individual cloud accounts.

One EDB customer is Ever.ag, a provider of tech solutions for food and agricultural supply chains. Tim Pope, the company’s technical program manager, noted that getting the most out of Postgres requires deep expertise: “Uptime percentages are critical, as the applications we’re migrating have a very low tolerance for downtime. We want to ensure that our developers can most effectively utilize the features of Postgres, and I appreciate EDB making it easier to test items and spin up new environments in a single click.”

EDB says that whether customers decide to use BigAnimal’s cloud account or their own, they will receive 24/7 monitoring, enhanced security measures, network configuration, automatic backups, and expert support. The company also seeks to make tracking and managing cloud costs easier by aligning BigAnimal’s database-as-a-service charges and cloud infrastructure costs in a single, consolidated bill.

“Flexibility and ease of use have always been key to user acceptance and adoption of database technology, yet these characteristics are often missing from various open-source deployments, particularly involving PostgreSQL,” said Carl Olofson, research VP of data management software at IDC, in a release. “EDB BigAnimal, especially with the enhancements announced here, overcomes such obstacles to adoption and should result in more rapid acceptance of EDB Postgres in the public cloud, and faster and more successful deployments.”

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