I spent the early part of my career working on developer tools, operating systems, high-speed file systems, and scale-out storage. Not databases. Frankly, I always thought that databases were a bit boring. So almost 2 years in to my new job at a Postgres company, I continue to be amazed at the enthusiasm of the PostgreSQL developer community and users. I mean, people’s eyes light up when you ask them why they love Postgres. Sure, a lot of us get animated when talking about our newest gadget, or Ronaldo’s phenomenal free-kick goal in the World Cup, or mint chip gelato from La Strega Nocciola—but most platform software simply doesn’t trigger this kind of passion. So why does Postgres? Why is this open source database having such a “moment”? Well, I’ve been trying to understand, looking at this “Postgres moment” from a few different angles. In this talk I’ll share what I’ve observed to be the top 10 business, technology, and community reasons so many of you have so much affection for PostgreSQL.

1. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | San Francisco
Why PostgreSQL
Why This Database
Why Now
Claire Giordano, Citus Data / Microsoft
@clairegiordano / @citusdata / @azuredbpostgres
Now Part of Microsoft
SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup 7.23.19

2. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | San Francisco
Hi, I’m Claire—and I’m a
Principal PM Manager
at Microsoft, by way of the
recent Citus Data
acquisition, where I was
VP of Marketing.

3. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | San Francisco
Hi, I’m Claire—and I’m a
Principal PM Manager
at Microsoft, by way of the
recent Citus Data
acquisition, where I was
VP of Marketing.
Engineering > Product > Marketing

4. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | San Francisco
Preferred programming language
Hi, I’m Claire—and I’m a
Principal PM Manager
at Microsoft, by way of the
recent Citus Data
acquisition, where I was
VP of Marketing.
Engineering > Product > Marketing

5. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | San Francisco
Preferred programming language
Hi, I’m Claire—and I’m a
Principal PM Manager
at Microsoft, by way of the
recent Citus Data
acquisition, where I was
VP of Marketing.
@clairegiordano @citusdata @microsoft
Citus Data > Microsoft
Engineering > Product > Marketing

6. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

7. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco7 @clairegiordano

8. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco8
Peop
le’s
eyes
ligh
t up
@clairegiordano

9. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco9

10. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco10
Peter Eisentraut

11. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco11
Dimitri Fontaine at PGConfEU 2018.
Photo by Claire Giordano.
Peter Eisentraut at PGConfEU 2018.
Photo by Claire Giordano.
Lætitia Avrot at PGConfEU 2018.
Photo by Claire Giordano.
Stephen Frost at PGConfEU 2018.
Photo by Claire Giordano.

12. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
Why PostgreSQL?
Why This Database?
Why Now?
?@clairegiordano

13. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
people have so much affection for PostgreSQL
10 reasons
@clairegiordano

14. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
Open Source
1@clairegiordano
0Octocat icon courtesy of GitHub

15. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

16. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

17. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

18. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
ECOSYSTEM

19. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

20. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

21. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
It’s not open source,
it’s open engineering.”
possibly Simon Riggs,
2nd Quadrant
“

22. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

23. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
Come for the code. Stay for the community.

24. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
Community9 @clairegiordano Photo courtesy of @pgconfeu, Oct 2018 Lisbon

25. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

26. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

27. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco27

28. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
Source: https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/events/890.en.html

29. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco29 @clairegiordano
Not Oracle
8

30. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSource: Manu Cornet. Bonkers World. http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

31. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
7 @clairegiordano
Permissive
license

32. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco32

33. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
Forks make the community
strong.”
—Peter van Hardenberg,
Illustrated History of Postgres
“

34. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_derived_databases

35. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
6Trust
Hardened
Data Integrity
Maintainability
@clairegiordano

36. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco@clairegiordano

37. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
5
Heroku helped to
popularize
Postgres
@clairegiordano

38. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
4
NoSQL
did
not eat
the
world
@clairegiordano

39. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco39
Postgres is heating up
Source: Hacker News Hiring Trends through March 2019 | hntrends.com
Postgres
MySQL
MongoDB

40. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco@clairegiordano
3
Timing of JSON &
JSONB
support

41. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
2@clairegiordano
CREATE EXTENSION postgis;
PostGIS
Photo by Claire Giordano

42. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco42
PostGIS is the
industry
standard way
to model spatial
data in a
database
PostGIS graphic courtesy of www.postgis.net

43. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco43
PostGIS
matters
because
location is the
universal
foreign key”
PostGIS graphic courtesy of www.postgis.net
“
—Paul Ramsey

44. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

45. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
Visualizing patterns & relations by
geographic properties is a powerful thing.

46. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco46

47. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
Everything is related to
everything else, but near things
are more related than distant
things.”
—Waldo Tobler, American-Swiss geographer
& cartographer
“

48. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
And now……….. #1 reason

49. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
1
Extension APIs
@clairegiordano

50. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
We are still dining out on the
radical design decision by Michael
Stonebraker in the Design of
Postgres—to have
run-time extensions.”
—Paul Ramsey, Lisbon, PGConfEU 2018
“

51. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
Michael
Stonebraker
Source: Wikipedia

52. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

53. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco

54. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco54
Not everyone has to agree, up-front

55. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
PostGIS
Citus
postgresql-HLL
pg_partman
pg_cron
postgresql-topn
postgresql-unit
pguri
postgis.net/
citusdata/citus
citusdata/postgresql-hll
pgpartman/pg_partman
petere/pguri
citusdata/pg_cron
ChristophBerg/postgresql-unit
citusdata/postgresql-topn

56. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San FranciscoSF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
PostGIS
Citus
postgresql-HLL
pg_partman
pg_cron
postgresql-topn
postgresql-unit
pguri
postgis.net/
citusdata/citus
citusdata/postgresql-hll
pgpartman/pg_partman
petere/pguri
citusdata/pg_cron
ChristophBerg/postgresql-unit
citusdata/postgresql-topn
AND SO MANY MORE
POSTGRES EXTENSIONS
AND MORE THAT WE HAVEN’T YET IMAGINED

57. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
It’s deeply satisfying to
work on a technology
(PostgreSQL!) that not
only delights developers,
but makes their lives light
years better.”
“
—Claire Giordano,
Nordic PGDay 2019
@clairegiordano

58. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
Matt Asay
Lætitia Avrot
Dave Cramer
Herb Cunitz
Nils Dijk
Peter Eisentraut
Vik Fearing
Dimitri Fontaine
Stephen Frost
Önder Kalaci
Amit Kapila
Günce Kaya
Craig Kerstiens
Paul Ramsey
Marco Slot
Sai Srirampur
My Nguyen
Peter van Hardenberg
Tom Lane
Jonathan Katz
PGConfEU audience
Isaac Alves
Danese Cooper
Devrim Gündüz
Thank You!

59. SF Bay Area PostgreSQL Meetup | July 2019 | San Francisco
Thank
@ clairegiordano
@ citusdata
@ microsoft
@ azureDBpostgres
github.com/citusdata/citus
you!
p.s. Socks
&stickers
Now Part of Microsoft