As an open source project, the Postgres community has always had great difficulty in measuring many aspects of Postgres adoption. For example, how many people use Postgres? We don't know, because people can get Postgres from so many sources, and we have no easy way to track them. Surveys tell us that Postgres is probably the fourth most popular database, but more detailed information has proven elusive. We do get detailed Postgres case studies occasionally, e.g. Yandex Mail, but these are, of course, single-user reports.
Fortunately, EnterpriseDB commissioned IDC to study its own Postgres customers. The recently-released report has some valuable information, both for users considering Postgres and for Postgres support companies trying to convince users to choose Postgres.
The report only surveyed seven EnterpriseDB customers, but that is probably a representative sample of enterprises using Postgres. The study interviewed each of them and got interesting statistics about administrative overhead, deployment flexibility, and the amount of money saved. It also has some nice charts and customer quotes.
IDC will be presenting on Wednesday afternoon at the Postgres Vision conference. It might be nice to get this data repackaged for other conferences — I rarely see management-oriented, data-driven talks about why to choose Postgres. Fortunately, there is a recording (email registration required) of a webcast presenting this material.
Bruce Momjian is a Senior Database Architect at EnterpriseDB.
This post originally appeared on Bruce's personal blog.