A New Way to Bring the Power and Versatility of PostgreSQL to Your Enterprise

I’m a huge fan of jazz music. I love how the best jazz musicians evolve over the years. As a genre, jazz tends to eschew one-hit wonders. Instead, my favorite artists take me through an inspired journey of music that grows and changes with time and influences.

All of that makes PostgreSQL the Miles Davis of database technology.

PostgreSQL has matured and continues to grow market share while other flash-in-the-pan databases have come and gone. In fact, PostgreSQL is one of these transcendent open-source projects (along with Kubernetes, Spring, Knative, Kafka, and Cloud Foundry) that should be a foundational building block of your digital strategy.

To help our customers capitalize on PostgreSQL, we’re pleased to announce Pivotal Postgres: open-source PostgreSQL binaries, packaged and commercially supported by Pivotal. This offering will appeal to customers who want a strong, self-managed PostgreSQL offering independent of our Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform. (For customers keen to use platform-managed PostgreSQL along with Pivotal Application Service, we also have Crunchy Data and A9s).

Let’s examine the rise of PostgreSQL to see how we got here.

PostgreSQL Has Seen Remarkable Growth in the Last 20 Years

When it comes to relational databases, Postgres is not a one-hit wonder; it has been improved consistently for over 20 years. Some of the world’s largest organizations use it at scale in production. DB-Engines even named Postgres the database management system of the year in 2018 and 2019. And PostgreSQL powers robust analytical databases like the recently announced Pivotal Greenplum 6.

Why the popularity? Sure, folks like lower costs and lack of vendor lock-in. But the bigger reason is simple: open source communities can innovate faster. Developers and IT leaders have been noticing.

PostgreSQL: The World’s Most Versatile Database

The killer feature for PostgreSQL is versatility.

PostgreSQL stores various “styles” of data, such as relational tables, objects, documents, key-value pairs, and graphs. In addition, PostgreSQL supports a rich selection of data types and programming languages, which allows developers to cast a wide net with one diverse database. PostgreSQL is not always a replacement for the various styles of specialized databases, but the breadth of needs it covers can markedly simplify your technology portfolio.

With PostgreSQL, developers can focus on solving business problems, rather than evaluating and choosing technologies. The breadth of workloads PostgreSQL can handle reduces the number of databases you have to manage across your app portfolio. When you find a single piece of tech that can fit many use cases, it’s an easy call.

The alternative is unattractive.

Over the last decade, we’ve seen an explosion of specialized products with narrower slices of functionality. Developers often end up sinking inordinate amounts of time into researching, learning, upgrading, and following a fragmented portfolio of technologies rather than focusing their attention on the business problems they’re trying to solve. Choice is wonderful, but as my colleague Richard Seroter would say, “The Best Digital Transformers Choose When to Choose.”

Pivotal Postgres: Self-Managed Open-Source Postgres You Can Run Anywhere

Pivotal Postgres is open source Postgres and supported by the experts at Pivotal. It is part of the Pivotal Data Suite (PDS). Here are three things to know about Pivotal Postgres:

Pivotal Postgres is 100% open source. It’s based on the source tree published at postgresql.org. It’s supported 24/7 by the experts at Pivotal. We’ve got deep expertise supporting operational databases. Focus on your business, and let us deal with the support. Enterprise-ready. We include open source PostgreSQL, as well as many important modules often required in large production deployments enterprises, like replication manager and the appropriate drivers.

If you’re looking to move away from proprietary databases, Pivotal Postgres should be on your short list of alternatives. Users have given PostgreSQL high ratings for a number of attributes, including cost and usability. These advantages don’t come at the expense of other features—in fact, PostgreSQL stacks up quite well in comparison.

Continue Your Open Source Journey with Pivotal

Today’s news is a long time coming. Our team has delivered commercial Postgres-based products for more than 14 years, including Greenplum, our analytical database which just had a major upgrade.. Over the years, our developers have contributed hundreds of commits to the Postgres open source community. And we have deep Postgres expertise in our sales, support, and service organizations.

I’m comforted in my belief that there is no end in sight for the forward progression of jazz, my favorite genre of music. The history of jazz shows us that the genre has never stopped evolving and growing. The same goes for PostgreSQL—the consistent evolution and improvements to this database over the decades have made me a believer.

So let us make you a believer too! We’re excited to bring the power and versatility of PostgreSQL to your operational use cases.

More about Pivotal Postgres

Get more information about Pivotal Postgres

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