Thanks for tuning into EDB’s audio blog series, The Builders, where business and tech thought leaders weigh in on top database industry trends and insights.
In this episode, EDB CTO Marc Linster discusses why Postgres is the most transformative open source tech since Linux, and how top enterprises are innovating and scaling by running the same Postgres on every cloud. Listen to learn how to unlock the power of Postgres everywhere.
Want to learn more? Download our white paper, What is Polycloud? Leveraging Cloud Differentiation in Modern Digital Applications.
Transcript:
Thanks for tuning in to EDB's audioblog series, "The Builders," where business and tech thought leaders weigh in on top database industry trends and insights. In this episode, EDB CTO Marc Linster discusses why Postgres is the most transformative open-source tech since Linux, and how top enterprises are innovating and scaling by running Postgres on every cloud. Listen and learn how to unlock the power of Postgres everywhere.
Hi everybody! Today, we will talk about the power of Postgres—every data type, every cloud, everywhere. This is the reason why we, at EDB, believe that Postgres is the most transformative open-source technology since Linux. Let that sink in for a moment. Remember how much Linux changed the game? Today, the majority of web servers, applications, and ERPs are running on Linux. Postgres is just the next logical step in that transformation.
One thing that's happening today is that companies must shift to new digital operating models. They have to do that to compete and stay relevant. A new world has emerged. Some say data is the new oil, some say data is the new currency. But what's really important is that data has become a strategic asset. With data being a strategic asset, database platforms, especially in the cloud, have become incredibly important in today's business landscape.
Digital transformation is well underway. As I mentioned earlier, just like Linux, it started happening about 15 years ago. The modern IT stack is defined by the cloud and open source re-platforming. The core database is central to this shift. It started with Linux, then came the application servers, then the web servers, and now it's time for the database. This isn't a revolution; it's an evolution—a process that started many years ago and has been incredibly successful.
We should all be aware of the tipping point of licenses. Open-source database licenses surpassed legacy licenses quite some time ago. Again, this isn't a revolution, nor a surprise—it's a logical evolution. The logical next step in the movement of the IT stack towards open source and the cloud. This crossover happened in 2021. I'm emphasizing this because it's important for everybody to understand that if you're moving to Postgres or an open-source database today, you're not a pioneer. You're well in the middle of the pack. Others have already blazed this path. This isn't a risky undertaking.
Many companies have already made the switch to Postgres. As the CTO of Enterprise DB, I work with many of them, and I can assure you that they're not using Postgres for small departmental or development solutions. Many of these companies are running mission-critical business systems on Postgres. So, today, Postgres is being trusted in financial services, technology, and telecom industries worldwide by numerous companies. Therefore, if you adopt Postgres today, you're not alone or leading the pack. You're safely in the middle.
So, what drives this adoption? As I mentioned earlier, the shift to data being the new oil puts tremendous pressure on today's databases. Databases must support new enterprise applications, which have different requirements. They need significantly better economics to handle the increasing amount of data and the development of numerous applications. The old cost models simply cannot keep up. Furthermore, these databases must be able to run on every cloud. Nobody wants to be locked into a single cloud provider. The ability to run everywhere is essential to avoid being held hostage by a database or application vendor. That's why the demand is for applications and databases that can be run on any cloud.
Another crucial factor is the importance of developer satisfaction. In digital transformation, speed is crucial. To move fast, you need to attract the right talent. And the right talent is drawn to environments that provide the tools they love to work with. Postgres has a significant advantage over other databases—it is loved by developers. I'll share some data with you shortly to convince you that Postgres is currently the number one database for developers. This is one of the reasons why it is highly adopted for digital transformation projects that require speed.
To move fast, you also need a large talent pool. If you choose a technology that nobody can use, you're wasting a lot of money. It's vital to select a technology that allows you to find talent in your market. Additionally, the database must support every data type. In the past, we only talked about tables and relations, but today, databases need to handle documents, XML, GIS, graphs, and more. Postgres supports all of these data types, making it even more beloved by developers.
The wide range of use cases is also crucial. People want to migrate from Oracle, DB2, and Informix to Postgres, but it's also important to create new applications and venture into new domains. Therefore, databases that support all these aspects are highly sought after.
Now, let's dive deeper into the economic game-changer. Undoubtedly, this is one of the top requirements. Databases are the number one software spend in IT. As a former CIO, I can tell you that databases were my highest software cost. To meet the demands of doing more with limited resources, moving to Postgres can help reduce costs by 80%. Imagine being a CIO continuously asked to do more with just a little bit more money. Moving to open-source databases presents a unique opportunity to allocate funds from maintenance to innovation. This is similar to what happened with Linux, application servers, and web servers—open source software significantly lowers costs, allowing more investment in innovation.
Another essential aspect is running Postgres on every cloud and operating system. Platforms are evolving rapidly, and nobody wants to be tied to a single operating system, cloud provider, or virtualization platform. Postgres made a smart decision years ago to run on POSIX, which serves as an isolation layer between the software and the operating system. Thanks to that decision, Postgres can run everywhere. This flexibility allows organizations to take advantage of the economics, flexibility, and agility offered by various platforms.
It's worth noting that 65% of users today prefer fully managed cloud services. Every cloud provider must offer a fully managed service.
Going forward, I mentioned that Postgres supports every data type. Not just every cloud, but every data type. I already talked about tables and relations, which is how we started. But one smart thing that Mike Stonebreaker and his team did was create the possibility to create new data types in Postgres. That led to supporting documents, key-value pairs, XML, geodata types, and soon, graph inside Postgres. This gives you an incredibly powerful and cost-effective environment to do a variety of things within the same database.
Think about it. Most applications today are designed for mobile apps, right? They're supposed to run on mobile devices. And what do mobile devices use today? They use browsers, they transact in JSON, and they're mostly geo-aware. Now imagine the powerful environment that Postgres provides for these new, next-generation applications. It can handle tables and relations, as we usually use for debits, credits, and inventories. It can handle documents for flexible and personalized environments. And it can handle geographic information. You can easily find out how far away the next piece of inventory is, where the next store is, or where the next ATM is, all within the same transactional environment. I hope you can understand why developers get so excited about this and why productivity is so high.
Let me give you a simple example of how JSON and ANSI SQL work together inside Postgres. I won't go into the details here, but what you can see is that it's just one query. Yes, there are some funny squiggly notations, but those are just call-outs to JSON documents. This is how we combine relational transactional capabilities with JSON documents within the same transactional environment. It's the same talent, the same backup, the same recovery, the same hardware, the same license, the same procedures, the same run books. Just imagine what that can do for your productivity. That's why developers and database operators really like Postgres.
Now, I also talked about the talent pool, and that's very important. If you invest in technology that nobody can use or find only a couple of people who can work with it, it may not be the most fruitful investment. But with Postgres, you have a vibrant global community with hundreds of active contributors. Let me give you some stats from the last release of Postgres, version 15, which came out last year. There were over 700 people who contributed code, not just people who fixed bugs or were on the mailing list. Over 700 people contributed code. There were 55,000 commits, and 144 companies were actively contributing to Postgres. Why does that matter? It matters because you have a vast global talent pool that you can tap into, and that is crucial because without talent, you can't effectively use your software. Without being able to put your software to use, your digital transformation project won't go anywhere. So, understanding that there is talent available is really important.
And here's a moment of pride for us at EDB. We are the largest contributor to Postgres. We may not be the majority, but we are the largest contributor. Again, talent is really important, and you have that with Postgres.
Now, I said that Postgres is loved by developers, and I want to emphasize how important it is to have that developer love. You want to attract that talent. Let me share some stats with you. Postgres is the number one database running in Docker, which is a top technology. Postgres is also the number one database on the technology radar for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And according to the Stack Overflow survey from 2022, Postgres is the number one most loved, most used, and most wanted database by developers. Post
Talk about the wide range of use cases. New developments are obviously important, and Postgres is great for things like microservices. We're seeing more and more vendors, ISVs, and OEMs building their commercial off-the-shelf systems on Postgres. That's definitely something that's happening. But then, the second thing is that Postgres has always been very popular for migrations. Lift and shift from Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Informix, Sybase. It's a huge part of our business to help people get off legacy systems, shake off the shackles or the ball and chain of very expensive, proprietary license environments that don't allow them to move to the cloud. Because some of those software vendors don't allow you to move to the cloud of your choice. And that's not great. Cloud freedom, or rather the lack of it, is not acceptable as far as I'm concerned.
We're seeing Postgres used a lot more in analytical applications. Operational data stores, data marts. That's what we're seeing. Almost 60 percent of our customers use Postgres today. So that's a use case that you may not be thinking about when you first consider Postgres. But it's not only used in OLTP environments. We now see it in IoT environments, in analytical environments. And that's really what's driving its success. Partly because it's open source, but a lot of it is because it's very, very standards-based.
And then, cloud transformations. Because it runs on every cloud. On private cloud, public cloud, Kubernetes, hosted, self-managed, fully managed. You can always run Postgres. One of our large retail customers tells their developers to please develop for the Postgres API and don't worry about a thing. Because with Postgres, it'll run everywhere. Just code to that API and then let the infrastructure people decide where the app's going to run. Imagine how much agility and flexibility that gives you. How much control of your environment you get out of that.
Now, at EDB, we've added to Postgres a little bit. We've created something that we call EDB Postgres Advanced Server. It's always in sync with Postgres, so it has all the features that Postgres has. But we added on things like transparent data encryption. And if you come from Oracle, you know how important that is, especially in financial services or anybody who deals with personally identifiable information or PII. And we also added Oracle compatibility. Native Oracle compatibility. So the ability to natively understand PL/SQL, stored procedures, cursors, all of those things. We extended Postgres to make it much more flexible and much more powerful.
And then we took all of that, all these advantages of Postgres together with Oracle compatibility, and we packaged that into a managed service. We call it EDB Managed DBaaS. It's fully managed Postgres in the cloud. It's the Postgres DBAs from the Postgres experts. And again, it's the Postgres DBAs from the people who contribute the most to Postgres and have been doing that for nearly 20 years. It gives you the Postgres that you want. It could be PostgreSQL open source, or it could be EDB Postgres Advanced Server, the Oracle-compatible version. And it gives you the ultimate agility. It's available on AWS, on Azure, and next month, it's going to be available on GCP in a fully managed platform.
So imagine what that allows you to do. It is the same Postgres on every cloud. And then you can also deploy that same Postgres, exactly the same Postgres, in a self-managed environment on virtual machines, infrastructure as a service, Kubernetes, or bare metal. So that gives you the opportunity to be alternative flexible, consume your committed cloud infrastructure spend, but for those applications that have to or want to run on-prem, use the same Postgres. And when you're ready to move to the cloud, well, you take that same Postgres and you run it in the cloud, fully managed. That gives you really the best of all choices to work with Postgres in the cloud or on-prem.
Thank you.