The biggest thing in Open Source since Linux: PostgresSQL

By Marc Linster, Chief Technology Officer, EDB

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Change is a constant, but it’s rare to have so many change vectors rocking our world at the same time. A sample would include: febrile geopolitics; pandemic; rising middle classes and consumerism in populous countries such as China, India and elsewhere; turmoil and disenfranchisement in economic blocs such as the EU; sustainability being viewed as being in the last-chance saloon, and on and on and on. Never has the need for business adaptability been so great because, literally, we don’t know what’s coming around the next corner.

That means those organizations which can hedge, be fleet of foot and manage risk will excel. And all this has clear implications for digitization and how we manage and understand the precious data we own or can access to identify trends, fast.

Managing change has always been of enormous importance and it is not an exaggeration to say that companies executing change management well are indexed with companies that are successful. In 2020, Bain & Company reported: “Companies with high Change Power are more profitable … with margins twice those of companies with lower Change Power. These change masters also grow revenue up to three times faster.”[1] Similarly, IBM, when it asked about two-to-three-year CEO priorities, the biggest single action (cited by 56 per cent of respondents) was “to aggressively pursue operational agility and flexibility”.[2]

In an environment where companies rise and fall at record rates, organizations today face some of their biggest-ever challenges. The rapid response to the pandemic and the push to digitize services means there are no longer any excuses for ducking demands from employees, customers and partners in supply chains who now expect a far more agile, digitally enhanced user experience and systems of engagement.

Data management is at the heart of all this approach and processes. So, how do you enable transformation initiatives that provide the agility and scalability to respond to changing market conditions? The answer lies in the unparalleled flexibility and integration of open source and (bias aside!) I would argue it starts with your database strategy. Indeed, I would go further and suggest that transformation requires using the most transformative open source technology since Linux. That would be PostgreSQL.

Boardroom debate is consumed by how to deliver agility and resilience. IT strategy must help the business to fulfil this requirement and the database is at the heart of efforts to understand customers and pre-empt their needs. PostgreSQL gives organizations the confidence that they are using a database with the capabilities to meet every need.

According to Stackoverflow’s 2021 Developer survey it’s the most wanted database among its respondents (as well as one of the most loved!) and its vast ecosystem provides the groundswell adaptability and fast start companies need. Uniquely, it can be the system of record but also the key to engagement and analytics.

In an environment where companies rise and fall at record rates, organizations today face some of their biggest-ever challenges. The rapid response to the pandemic and the push to digitize services means there are no longer any excuses for ducking demands from employees, customers and partners in supply chains who now expect a far more agile, digitally enhanced user experience and systems of engagement.

Postgres offers rich functionality, the reassurance of five nines reliability, data portability in cloud environments, and agility and scalability through automation and standardization.

It supports composable environments that can be rapidly reconfigured, and it is backed by a diverse, independent community rather than being dominated by a single vendor that can force lock-in.

Often forgotten, the POSIX interface also makes it ubiquitous, while Postgres’s object relational model means we can add in data types and associated operators while benefiting from tight integration with transactional capabilities.

All these factors mean that PostgreSQL can support the business everywhere and there is a wide variety of use cases to give organizations the confidence to believe PostgreSQL can meet their specific mission-critical application needs. And for those that aren’t yet up to speed, there’s a proven methodology for deployment success that covers deciding platforms on which to deploy Postgres, building an application tiering framework in terms of recovery time/point objectives and geographic recovery objectives, defining and automating reference architectures, and evolving Postgres skills.

Postgres offers rich functionality, the reassurance of five nines reliability, data portability in cloud environments, and agility and scalability through automation and standardization.

Every crisis and juncture creates an opportunity. Microsoft Windows and Office thrived to create a pluralist alternative to host computing while Linux prospered when companies embraced the web and sought value-based alternatives to proprietary ecosystems. Both Microsoft and the broader Linux community benefited hugely from armies of support that made them the path of least resistance. In the data age when so much is so uncertain, Postgres is following a similar path having established a broad and active community which is helping to ensure Postgres has the range of functionality and robustness a great fit for our times.