December 18, 2015
In 2013 I blogged about Postgres advancing in multiple directions at once. Having presented my Postgres 9.5 features talk six times already (with another one coming on Tuesday), I have noticed a broader pattern.
Looking at my top-ten items from that presentation, you can see Postgres advancing in multiple use-case directions in the 9.5 release:
- Big data: brin (#2), sharding infrastructure (#9)
- Data analytics: grouping sets, cube, rollup (#3)
- Large servers: memory and locking (#5, #6)
- NoSQL: jsonb (#8)
This shows increased multi-directional activity compared to 2013.
Most company-controlled software can advance in one direction, perhaps two, simultaneously. With the community-based development of Postgres, the software can advance effortlessly in multiple directions at the same time. Well, maybe not effortlessly, but pretty close. 
Bruce Momjian is a Senior Database Architect at EnterpriseDB.
This post originally appeared on Bruce Momjian's personal blog.