Why PostgreSQL? Why This Database? Why Now? | Swiss PGDay 2019 | Claire Giordano

Abstract from PostgreSQL talk delivered at Swiss PGDay in Rapperswil, Switzerland in June of 2019:

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.

Transcript

1. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Why PostgreSQL Why This Database Why Now Claire Giordano, Citus Data / Microsoft @clairegiordano / @citusdata / @microsoft Now Part of Microsoft Swiss PGDay | Jun 2019 | Rapperswil
2. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 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 Athens > Nantes
3. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland
4. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 4 @clairegiordano
5. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 5 Peop le’s eyes ligh t up @clairegiordano
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7. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 7 Peter Eisentraut
8. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 8 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.
9. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Why PostgreSQL? Why This Database? Why Now? ? @clairegiordano
10. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland people have so much affection for PostgreSQL 10 reasons @clairegiordano
11. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Open Source 1 @clairegiordano 0 Octocat icon courtesy of GitHub
12. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Why does it matter that Postgres is open source? How does the “open source-ness” of Postgres contribute to the growing popularity of Postgres? Because Postgres is free. As in freedom.
13. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Easy for developers to kick the tires.
14. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Able to avoid vendor lock-in.
15. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland ECOSYSTEM Open source aspect of Postgres contributes to the thriving ecosystem of expertise, tooling, integrations.
16. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Don’t have to reinvent the wheel Onager-drawn cart in Sumeria c. 2500 BC. Public domain.
17. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Transparency of open source.
18. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Open source means Postgres is not a black box.
19. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland It’s not open source, it’s open engineering.” possibly Simon Riggs, 2nd Quadrant “
20. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland
21. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Come for the code. Stay for the community.
22. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Community 9 @clairegiordano Photo courtesy of @pgconfeu, Oct 2018 Lisbon
23. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland
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26. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Source: https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/events/890.en.html
27. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 27 @clairegiordano Not Oracle 8
28. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Source: Manu Cornet. Bonkers World. http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
29. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 7 @clairegiordano Permissive license
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31. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Forks make the community strong.” —Peter van Hardenberg, Illustrated History of Postgres “
32. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_derived_databases
33. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 6 Trust Hardened Data Integrity Maintainability @clairegiordano
34. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland @clairegiordano
35. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 5 Heroku helped to popularize Postgres @clairegiordano
36. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 4NoSQL did not eat the world @clairegiordano
37. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 37 Postgres is heating up Source: Hacker News Hiring Trends through March 2019 | hntrends.com Postgres MySQL MongoDB
38. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland @clairegiordano 3 Timing of JSON & JSONB support
39. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 2 @clairegiordano CREATE EXTENSION postgis; PostGIS Photo by Claire Giordano
40. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 40 PostGIS is the industry standard way to model spatial data in a database PostGIS graphic courtesy of www.postgis.net
41. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 41 PostGIS matters because location is the universal foreign key” PostGIS graphic courtesy of www.postgis.net “ —Paul Ramsey
42. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Visualizing patterns & relations by geographic properties is a powerful thing.
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44. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” —Waldo Tobler, American-Swiss geographer & cartographer “
45. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland And now……….. #1 reason
46. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 1 Extension APIs @clairegiordano
47. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 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 “
48. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Michael Stonebraker Source: Wikipedia
49. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland
50. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland
51. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 51 Not everyone has to agree, up-front
52. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 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
53. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 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
54. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 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
55. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland 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 Jeff Davis Samay Sharma PGConf.EU Conference committee Nordic PGDay conference committee Swiss PGDay conference committee Thank You!
56. Swiss PGDay 2019 | Rapperswil, Switzerland Thank @ clairegiordano @ citusdata @ microsoft @ azureDBpostgres github.com/citusdata/citus you! p.s. Socks &stickers Now Part of Microsoft