Why businesses are choosing PostgreSQL to drive digital transformation

With the ability to run in containers, on every cloud computing platform, in every data center, and on every developer laptop – is Postgres the database leader for new applications?
12 May 2020

The PostgreSQL elephant. Source: Shutterstock

  • Choosing the right database management system has never been more important – flexibility and interoperability are key
  • Many businesses are embracing the benefits of open source, and PostgreSQL is the number-one choice – here’s why:

Smart organizations are fueling the adoption of enterprise data management solutions and services, particularly in Asia Pacific, where growth is expected to rocket from US$77.9 billion in 2020 to US$122.9 billion in 2025.

At the same time, cloud-based databases are becoming more popular. By 2022, Gartner predicts 75 percent of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform, with only 5 percent ever considered for repatriation to on-premises.

The IDC predicts that the top four cloud platforms in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) will be the destinations of choice for about 70 percent of workloads by the same year.

As the world becomes increasingly digitized, companies need to keep up or risk becoming obsolete. In this brave new technologically advanced world, having a database management system that helps ready organizations to scale rapidly is essential.

Flexibility and interoperability

While many factors go into choosing the ideal database management system, flexibility and interoperability should be non-negotiable.

In agile projects, especially at the beginning of the project, not everything is known – not even the cloud infrastructure. Being locked into a platform or vendor inhibits developers from considering specific database capabilities, such as stored procedures, data types and advanced operators.

To overcome this issue, many developers now limit themselves to standard ANSI SQL and Object Request Brokers, and recreate many database capabilities in the application logic, such as transactional consistency, data management and queries.

This approach, however, may lead to large portions of custom code, significantly lowering performance and introducing transactional inconsistencies.

What organizations and developers need are flexible and interoperable systems, or, open source databases – but not just any type of open source databases.

The promise of PostgreSQL

According to a recent report, more than 50 percent of enterprises surveyed in Asia Pacific said that they use open-source databases.

According to Gartner, projections show that “by 2022, more than 70 percent of new in-house applications will be developed on an OSDBMS [open-source database management system] or OSDBMS-based dbPaaS [database platform as a service], and 50 percent of existing proprietary RDBMS instances will have been converted or be in process of converting.” This underlines the rise of OSDBMS across enterprises.

While many OSDBMS exist in the market, PostgreSQL is an extremely popular choice, if we go by a list of the most-used OSDBMS in 2019. It is also one of the most well-loved database technologies among developers.

There are several reasons for this: PostgreSQL is available everywhere – on all key public clouds, relevant operating systems and virtualization platforms that matter to modern development.

On these platforms, multiple vendors provide support, and users can also choose to self-support. As such, users do not need to be concerned about vendor lock-in, obsolescence or performance issues.

PostgreSQL also combines tremendous capabilities in a single platform, including transactional, document-oriented, geographic information system (GIS) and full text search functions.

In addition, developers can take advantage of stored procedures, a rich library of data types, and extensions such as PostGIS, and can rebalance the business logic across stored procedures and custom application code.

This means that developers can delve far deeper with PostgreSQL than with an ANSI SQL interface. They can also write less code, have a much more performant application, and go to market faster.

There are management tools for PostgreSQL, to make sure that the database operators and DBAs can create and manage highly available PostgreSQL deployments. These tools bridge between PostgreSQL as a first-rate development platform and Postgres as a highly reliable, scalable and cost-effective operational platform.

Using available PostgreSQL management tools will reduce database-related costs significantly, in some cases by up to two-thirds. In the past four years, PostgreSQL has also become almost 50 percent faster, and is poised to continue its improvement.

For organizations aiming to future-proof themselves, PostgreSQL – and the tools available to manage it – is playing a key role in making digital transformation ambitions a reality.

This article was contributed by Marc Linster, SVP, Product Development and Support at EnterpriseDB.