PostgreSQL is the New ‘Black’

Technology trends, like fashion trends, are cyclical—for good or bad.

Whether it’s ‘single-vendor’ strategy to flexibility and back again (welcome to Oracle’s ‘buy it all from us’ stack) or virtualization (mainframe to desktop back to enterprise servers), what’s old is new again.

Well, let me be the first to re-introduce you to PostgreSQL!

PostgreSQL (also known as Postgres) is more than 25 years old—created by Michael Stonebraker in 1985 after he made the Ingres database proprietary, hence the name origin:  Post-Ingres.

PostgreSQL was built with the same ‘guts’ as Oracle database, IBM’s DB2 and Sybase.  A true ACID compliant relational database, it’s meant to handle big transactional applications.

Alas, PostgreSQL never really took off the way many expected.  Database, by its nature, is ‘sticky’, and Oracle and IBM were gobbling up the market, which now stands at some $28 Billion per year.

Not only did ‘the big guys’ take the expensive end of the market, MySQL came along in the 90’s and took the ‘low end’ web application market—typically non-paying users that were building the next generation of web applications.  PostgreSQL had nowhere to fit:  until now.

Enter the PostgreSQL Renaissance:  Cloud Computing

You may think that you can just take your database and ‘run it in the cloud’, right?  Wrong.  It doesn’t work that way.  In fact, that’d be a ‘database in the cloud, and what enterprises need is a database for the cloud, with features such as:

1. Little-to-no cost barrier to entry:  ELIMINATE Oracle, DB2, Informix, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server
2. Familiar to developers and DBAs:  ELIMINATE NewSQL alternatives (they may have a piece of the market at some point)
3. Can handle read/write, transaction-intensive applications:  ELIMINATE MySQL (and those looking to leverage it, like Xeround), MongoDB and other NoSQL alternatives (not to say they don’t have a need to fill, it’s not this need)
4. Muti-platform:  ELIMINATE VMware’s Data Director (built on PostgreSQL, which is great, but limited to VMware’s platform)

PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB fulfill all of these needs.

Because it’s open source, there are free versions you can download, and even certified, supported and ‘cloudified’ versions, like our Postgres Plus Cloud Database, that are  inexpensive (as inexpensive as Amazon RDS), because we pass our open source cost savings on to the customer.

While PostgreSQL isn’t always ‘top of mind’, it’s considered the 3^rd most distributed database in the world, and it ships with virtually every Linux distribution worldwide.

With Postgres Plus Cloud Database, EnterpriseDB has significantly enhanced the community version to create the first truly elastic enterprise Database as a Service (DBaaS). With Postgres Plus Cloud Database, setting up your database cluster is a breeze.  You have many automated DBA tasks, along with real auto-elasticity (think elastic waist band versus belt loops).  And, with it’s 7th generation of Oracle compatibility, you can now migrate your physical Oracle databases to the cloud on Postgres Plus Cloud Database.

What’s more, the PostgreSQL community has worked hard (and successfully) to improve PostgreSQL’s performance for web applications.  So, anyone who says PostgreSQL can’t be the DBaaS for web applications needs to wake up (Skype, Hi5, Best Buy, urbandictionary.com).

Postgres Plus Cloud Database can be integrated with several cloud platforms, including Amazon, OpenShift, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, GoGrid and others—providing companies with infinite flexibility.

Other platforms are also choosing PostgreSQL as their DBaaS:  salesforce.com’s Heroku platform, EngineYard and VMware (with Cloud Foundry and Data Director) just to name a few.

So, you see, PostgreSQL is back,  as the cloud database.  It’s the new Black!

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