PostgreSQL 12 is available today. EnterpriseDB is a proud contributor to the PostgreSQL project and thrilled to work with the best and brightest minds in the PostgreSQL community to help make this release available for all.
PostgreSQL 12 focuses on making key features faster and more usable: better B-Tree indexes, faster copy statements and concurrent re-indexing. You can read more in 8 Major Improvements to PostgreSQL 12 or watch Bruce Momjian’s Pulse of Postgres Webinar.
Popularity of PostgreSQL is Exploding
It’s hard to believe that Postgres has been around for almost 30 years and is only increasing in popularity. Many of the hardware, storage, operating systems, and virtualization technologies that Postgres has been deployed on over the years have come and gone—as will some of the platforms on which Postgres is deployed on today. After all, do you remember HP Unix and SPARC? They are no longer ‘with us’ but PostgreSQL which was deployed on these operating systems, continues to grow, much of that growth from the explosion of PostgreSQL deployed in the public cloud.
Postgres has become a giant in the land of databases. According to a 2019 survey of nearly 90,000 developers by Stack Overflow, Postgres is now deployed even more commonly than SQL Server.
DB-Engine shows PostgreSQL on a strong trajectory to also surpass MySQL soon and has declared PostgreSQL "Database of the Year" for two consecutive years.
Postgres has long been the most general purpose database. All the innovation going on within the development community further extends this position to handle workloads that weren’t even conceived of at the time that Postgres was invented. The moral here is that if you are a convert to PostgreSQL, you are in good company, as many users have migrated from database technologies that are not evolving as quickly.
Vibrant Community
One of the most important attributes of any open source is the vibrancy of its community. Postgres is unique because it’s a true open source community; there is no individual vendor driving the roadmap. This means it takes a monumental effort to keep the momentum going and keep the project relevant. That proof is evident in the release of Postgres 12, which involved collaboration amongst over 400 contributors across multiple geographies. The result is a release with 1.6 million lines of code, 2,300 commits and 197 changes (as per the release notes). There is indeed good momentum if not increasing momentum.
Putting It All Together
What does all of this tell us and how does it relate to the new PostgreSQL 12? It clearly shows the popularity of Postgres among enterprises around the world and the enthusiasm of the Community. It tells us that PostgreSQL development is headed down the path of addressing emerging workload requirements.
This release combines enhancements in infrastructure, performance and polishes previously released features. EnterpriseDB has been actively developing and supporting Postgres for the last 15 years and is committed to making Postgres better. That means more portability across platforms today and in the future, more seamless migrations from expensive proprietary databases, more cloud native to support DevOps initiatives, more tool support, and more training options to ensure your staff is skilled in the features and capabilities of their database. What more could anyone want?