A brief glance at a list of the top five enterprise databases shows three released over the last 30 years, plus Oracle, which rose with the start of the company in 1979. Then there’s PostgreSQL.

The roots of PostgreSQL go back nearly half a century. It began as Ingres, co-created by Michael Stonebraker and Eugene Wong in 1974 and conceived as a way to broaden the scope of the relational database.

“One of the basic ideas in Postgres was to let the user have whatever basic data types he/she wants to manage, and don’t predefine them by insisting they be the ones that apply to business data processing,” said Stonebraker in a 2019 interview. “So the whole idea was to expand the reach of relational systems and Postgres did exactly that.”

The world’s top Postgres experts will explore what’s ahead for the database’s future and its impact on the global business community during Postgres Vision 2021. TheCUBE’s coverage of the event begins at 9 a.m EDT on June 22 and will run through 5 p.m. EDT on June 23. Event speakers will include Jeremy Wilmot, chief product officer of ACI Worldwide, Ed Boyajian, president and chief executive officer of EDB; Priyanka Sharma, general manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation; Suzette Kent, former U.S. federal CIO and business executive; and Bruce Momjian, vice president and Postgres evangelist at EDB. (* Disclosure below.)

Open-source transformation

One company that has been a major contributor to PostgreSQL since Version 8.3 is EnterpriseDB Corp. Founded in 2004, the company was rebranded last year to EDB, with a new tagline: “Power to Postgres.”

EDB has found success in enticing enterprises to make the shift to PostgreSQL from major database providers. In 2020, it was reported that EDB played a role in the migration of BG-Phoenics, a German IT firm serving the insurance market, from IBM Db2 and years prior had convinced TransUnion CIBIL in India to move from Oracle.

At the heart of EDB’s long-term strategy is a belief that the database market is primed for an open-source transformation, a reprise of what Red Hat was able to accomplish in disrupting enterprise Unix. Part of its current focus is in encouraging the open-source community to strengthen JSON features and align them with SQL in a common standard.

“No single vendor can drive the agenda,” Tony Baer, principal at dbInsight LLC, said in an interview with theCUBE. “It’s allowed a lot of innovation and was built on a very strong foundation.”

Hosted offerings

A key step for PostgreSQL on the innovation path has been the introduction of several hosted offerings by cloud providers. These include Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL as one of the platforms supported through its Relational database Service. Just recently, AWS followed this up with Aurora support for PostgreSQL 12.

When Microsoft launched a series of new capabilities for Azure in May, the updates included a Defender service for its PostgreSQL implementation that protects application data and monitors for unusual database activity.

Google Cloud announced support for PostgreSQL four years ago and has followed that up with its own innovations since. In April, the cloud provider unveiled open-source programming language Logica to run on the platform’s BigQuery cloud data warehouse with experimental support for PostgreSQL.

IBM partnership

PostgreSQL is also receiving a tailwind courtesy of IBM. The technology giant has a keen interest in integrating open-source databases into its platform, so it signed a multiyear partnership deal with EDB to resell PostgreSQL. In addition to EDB, IBM also supports open-source DataStax Enterprise and MongoDB Enterprise Server on IBM Cloud.

“EDB needs a big vendor to help reach out to support the broader market, while IBM needs to win and retain its customers across various types of use cases, including those that are using PostgreSQL,” said Noel Yuhanna, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, in an interview with theCUBE. “The success of this partnership is likely to depend on how aggressive their outreach will be across vertical industries and use cases and the joint marketing effort.”

EDB has numbers in its favor as far as new customer growth is concerned. While 70% of the firm’s growth comes from existing customers, a healthy 30% is generated by clients using Postgres for the first time, according to Ed Boyajian, EDB’s chief executive.

“With IBM we’ve had a long-standing informal relationship,” said Boyjian in an interview last year. “Now we’ll have a much more formal relationship that puts IBM in a position to bring Postgres products to market as part of their overall data and AI initiatives.”

Livestream of Postgres Vision 2021

Postgres Vision 2021 is a livestream event, with additional interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE interviews here on demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of Postgres Vision 2021, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during Postgres Vision 2021 include EDB’s Ed Boyajian, chief executive officer, and Marc Linster, chief technology officer. TheCUBE will also speak with Josh Berkus, Kubernetes community manager at Red Hat; Alan Villalobos, director of development, database partnerships and user experience at IBM; and Abdul Sheikh, chief technology officer of Cintra Software & Services.

Plus, don’t miss interviews with Young Il Cho, high availability cluster sales manager at DAONECNS Co.; Andy Harris, chief technology officer of Osirium; Roberto Giordano, end-user computing, corporate and database services manager at Borsa Italiana Group; and Jeremy Wilmot, chief product officer of ACI Worldwide.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Postgres Vision 2021 event. Neither EnterpriseDB, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE