Everybody loves fashion, right? That's why Zalando has managed to grow from a small, Berlin-based startup into Europe’s leading online fashion platform in just five years. But growing into a 15-country, publicly traded fashion destination can be difficult. Our creative team of product owners propose new ideas and feature requests every day, and our developers have to work hard to keep up with this pace of constant innovation. Relying on traditional relational database systems is perceived to be a limiting strategy when working in fast-paced development environments, mostly because these systems lack concurrent data model changes, offer only a few sets of data types, and present upfront complexity when it comes to learning how they work.

PostgreSQL provides an easy and flexible data management platform for developers, and has therefore become an essential part of Zalando's agile-focused technology stack. Postgres is easy to work with--once you embrace the power of SQL, as our team has done. It provides well-documented, standard-compliant SQL implementation, a reliable transaction engine, and high-quality tools for analyzing and solving performance issues.

The Zalando team has been exposed to multiple relational and NoSQL database systems, and has found PostgreSQL to be is the easiest one to work with. In this keynote talk, delivered at PGConf US earlier this year, Zalando Head of Data Engineering Valentine Gogichashvili discusses our experiences with PostgreSQL and how it has enabled us to scale our data operations in the face of 100 million visits per month. Check it out:

Want to work with Zalando's data and databases?Take a look at our data jobs here.