I have to say, I feel like I’ve been living under a rock for the past 20 years. Throughout the last couple of months, I’ve constantly been diving into the world of data infrastructure, and one of the most common things I’ve heard is: “Oh yeah, we can do that with Postgres.” Being utterly naive to the power of the popular relational database, I felt that I could no longer avoid the utility and elasticity (pun intended) of the beloved relational database. Postgres is going through a transformative renaissance: It’s beloved by its users, its community continues to grow, it has one of the most vigorous extensions of open-source communities (and remains one of the most well-maintained communities compared to the other RDBMs), the incumbents are highly cost-prohibitive (yes, you AWS RDS/Aurora) and lastly, no one wants to manage their databases anymore.
This confluence of tailwinds led me to speak with some of the brightest minds in the industry—and I couldn’t be more excited to share some of my learnings with you all. Postgres can’t solve *everything,* but its powers are hard to ignore. Most database usage is tied to the application for which it is being used; with the recent enhancements in AI/LLMs, the data layer remains absolute in its need to constantly evolve to support data-intensive applications. Postgres continues to be more than a utility and develops with the application layer despite multiple technology shifts (e.g., cloud to AI) across decades.
Extremely excited about the amount of innovation in the space, especially concerning the start-up ecosystem being led by companies such as Neon, Hydra, Omnigres, pgEdge, PostgresML, DBLab by Postgres.ai 💙💛, and Tembo. Also, big thanks to Johann Schleier-Smith, Joseph Sciarrino, Adam F., Patrick DeVivo, and Eyal Manor for the helpful thoughts and insights.
