Anyone looking at the history of the open-source relational database management system Postgres, which dates back to the 1970s with Ingres, would expect an outdated technology, no longer in use today. It turns out that the recent acceleration of digital transformation and changes in the database market, as well as product innovations themselves, have made it more current than ever – and growing rapidly.

Among the factors behind the expanding adoption of Postgres are the replatforming trend, the broad expansion of application development across the enterprise and the relentless expense of incumbent proprietary databases, according to Ed Boyajian (pictured), chief executive officer of EnterpriseDB Corp., a privately held provider of software and services based on Postgres and a noted contributor to PostgreSQL.

“Just like we saw in the world of Linux … where people were moving from Unix-based systems to X86 systems, we’re seeing that similar replatforming happening [now], whether that’s from traditional infrastructures to cloud-based infrastructures or container-based infrastructures,” Boyajian said. “It’s a great opportunity for databases to be changed out, [and] Postgres wins in that context because it’s so easily deployed anywhere.”

Boyajian spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during Postgres Vision 2021. They discussed what is changing in the market to make Postgres so compelling today, the advantages of Postgres over other databases, where its growth comes from and some of the most exciting things people can expect from Postgres Vision 2021. (* Disclosure below.)

Multi-model approach and versatility are fundamental features

The expansion of application development across the enterprise — it is no longer just in IT — is key to Postgres’ advancement because of the success the database management system has enjoyed among developers.

A Stack Overflow developer survey in 2020 placed it just second in popularity behind MySQL, the database management system used for simpler website applications, whereas PostgreSQL can take on more complex business applications.

Some of the reasons for this power of Postgres are the options it makes available to developers and a long history of being a secure and reliable database. As developers take on more power and control, they are just setting the agenda and pushing the use of that system, according to Boyajian.

Among Postgres’ important features is the multi-model approach, which means that it handles many other database requirements, whether geospatial, JSON for documents or Time-Series, for example.

Moreover, Postgres’ versatility, which allows it to be easily extended to business applications that cater to all types of data and workloads, makes it fit in a modern world and work across industries and companies of various sizes.

“Postgres extensibility is one of its inherent strengths, and that’s kind of been built in from the beginning of Postgres,” Boyajian highlighted. “So not surprisingly people use Postgres across a number of workloads because, at the end of the day, there’s still value in having a database that’s able to do more.”

EnterpriseDB, which was rebranded to EDB in mid-2020, sees Postgres growth taking place on several dimensions, such as in the universe of new applications and among users migrating away from some existing legacy. It is also gaining ground in the cloud, where Postgres is deployed very prolifically, both on traditional cloud platforms like EC2 and on the database as-a-service environment.

Another area of ​great growth is around the deployment of containers and Kubernetes.

“There are a lot of important specialty databases, and I think they will remain important specialty databases, but Postgres thrives in its ability to crossover in that way,” Boyajian state. “And I think that is one of the key differentiators in how we have seen the market and the business develop, and that’s the breadth of workloads that Postgres succeeds in.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Postgres Vision 2021. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Postgres Vision event. Neither EnterpriseDB Corp., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE