By Ashish Mehra, Country Head-Sales at EnterpriseDB
To compete and remain relevant in a challenging market, leading enterprises have significantly transformed their operations through new digital models. In this context, the open source relational database management system PostgreSQL has grown in popularity. Postgres is not only changing the physical landscape of the global database market; it is also impacting businesses looking to maximize data resiliency and performance.
While legacy, proprietary database providers have long dominated the market, companies now see the advantages that open source systems like Postgres offer in terms of economics and technical capabilities. Postgres is quickly outpacing legacy systems due to its flexibility, economics, and efficiency. As a result, it has become the fastest-growing database management system (DBMS) for modern open source applications.
Postgres Advantages for Enterprises
Postgres is becoming the most prolifically deployed database in modern data architectures. Developers pick Postgres more than any other database for its technical superiority compared to legacy and proprietary systems. Forward-thinking IT executives and developers alike choose Postgres for improved flexibility, economics and efficiency.
Flexibility: Postgres outperforms other databases, in the most critical contexts including technical performance flexibility and applicability across the broadest number of enterprise workloads and value. Open source is at the heart of this. For decision-makers, this means freedom from cumbersome contracts and locked systems, greater productivity for developers and data architects, and increased confidence in availability.
When it comes to the cloud, Postgres is the technology that best supports both the hybrid approach and a multi-cloud strategy. Enterprises are realizing the importance of data ownership and portability, and are therefore looking for options that reduce dependency on a single vendor. Once again, this is where open source databases such as Postgres offer an advantage. Organizations can run the same Postgres on any cloud platform, without vendor lock-in.
Affordability: As an open-source database system, Postgres can be a cost-effective solution for organizations. It can also be deployed on cloud platforms with pay-as-you-go pricing mechanisms. This implies that companies only pay for what they use, which can result in significant cost savings over traditional on-premises systems. As a result, businesses can benefit from paying for only the capacity used rather than over-provisioning for future needs.
Postgres is also inherently more affordable than legacy systems and servers and its license is extremely permissive, allowing enterprise customers to use every cloud, every deployment technology, every virtualization method and every storage technology. With database spend being a significant portion of overall IT spend, moving to open source provides distinctly better economics. These cost savings can add up to a significant economic impact on a regional economy.
Efficiency: Postgres is designed to be very efficient, with features that boost performance and reduce resource usage. When Postgres was designed at the University of California, Berkeley more than 30 years ago, its designers made sure that the underlying data model was inherently extensible. At the time, databases could only use very simple data types, like numbers, strings and dates. Michael Stonebreaker, one of EDB’s distinguished advisors and strategists, and his team made a fundamental design decision to make Postgres easy to add new data types and their associated operations.
For example, PostGIS is an extension of Postgres that makes it easy to work with geographic data elements, polygons, routes, etc. That alone has made Postgres one of the preferred solutions for mapping systems. Other well-known extensions are for document stores (JSON) and key value pairs (HSTORE). This extensible data model, together with the ability to run on every cloud, enables Postgres developers to be enormously productive and innovative.
In fact, Postgres can be implemented in the cloud in a scalable manner, which means it can automatically adjust to changes in workload demand. This enables firms to effortlessly add and remove resources as needed without requiring manual intervention.
Postgres: The Future of DBMS
Based on the current trajectory, businesses can expect Postgres to be the leading DBMS in the coming years. As companies compete to attract and retain top talent, the promise of innovation is at the forefront of crucial decision-makers’ minds. Its ability to do so has aided Postgres’s meteoric rise in recent years, and this trend shows no signs of slowing.
In addition, Postgres’s flexibility, affordability, and efficiency make it an appealing alternative for enterprises of all sizes. Its ability to handle a wide range of workloads, integrate with other tools and technologies, and be deployed on cloud platforms with pay-as-you-go pricing models makes it a cost-effective solution. As a result, its efficient architecture and ability to scale in the cloud make it a powerful tool for businesses that require high-performance database management.
