PostgreSQL has long been a popular database, loved by developers and database administrators for its ease of use, comprehensive and intuitive documentation, and reliability. Anyone at EnterpriseDB^® (EDB^™) could tell you that interest in PostgreSQL (also known as Postgres) has been growing rapidly in recent years, but that might be considered biased. Now, an unbiased source, DB-Engines, has announced that 2017 was a banner year for interest in Postgres. So much so that DB-Engines named Postgres “DBMS of the Year 2017”.
DB-Engines is a website known for ranking the popularity of databases and provides a measure of how much people are interested in different databases. And in the absence of revenues for many open source databases, the DB-Engines ranking is a helpful gauge of use and momentum for Postgres compared to other database management systems.
DB-Engines, operated by Austrian IT consulting firm solid IT gmbh, said in a recent blog post, that Postgres had gained more popularity within the preceding year than any of the 341 other database systems they monitor. Monthly gains in the DB-Engines Ranking showed PostgreSQL rose by 55.81 points (17%) over the course of 2017 to become the fourth most popular database in the world. The rankings are based on mentions of database solutions on websites and social networks, and in web searches, technical discussions, job listings, and professional profiles.
It’s something to celebrate given the hard work of the Postgres development community. Postgres 10 was a breakthrough release. It gave developers and DBAs much more flexibility when configuring Postgres to meet the specific demands of their workloads and infrastructures. And it added powerful new database features, including new parallel query and replication capabilities as well as many other security and performance improvements.
For EDB, the popularity of Postgres is gratifying. EDB contributes thousands of hours of engineering work each year to the community so the database can support new workloads and benefit more users. EDB also stages and sponsors the premier Postgres event, Postgres Vision, to help enterprises and governments share their Postgres experiences and learn best practices for optimizing Postgres for new workloads and cloud environments.
As the only Gartner Magic Quadrant recognized full-service Postgres Company, EDB provides customers with the most comprehensive offering of Postgres products and services that includes both open source Postgres and the enhanced EDB Postgres Advanced Server.  EDB’s training programs give data professionals the opportunity to advance their skills, including free training, as well as earning certification and digital badges that provide verification of their expertise. EDB also publishes a steady stream of resources for users to hone their skills through the EDB blog and user forum Postgres Rocks, where DBAs and database architects can interact with one another and EDB experts on unique problems with open source Postgres.
This designation from DB-Engines comes as no surprise to anyone who knows Postgres, and certainly no surprise to analysts who cover the industry. Postgres is growing so rapidly because it provides the performance and reliability of legacy commercial DBMS’s with far greater flexibility and with dramatically lower cost. Congratulations to Postgres for this well deserved honor!
Keith Alsheimer I Chief Marketing Officer, EnterpriseDB