The Competitive Advantage of Postgres
Top companies have undertaken major initiatives to transform their business with new digital models in order to compete and stay relevant. They are achieving infrastructure modernization and establishing their footprint as market leaders by recognizing data ownership as an economic advantage and databases as strategic assets.
Are you one of the leaders helping to drive this movement?
According to Red Hat’s “State of Enterprise Open Source” report, 80% of IT leaders expect to increase their use of enterprise open source software for emerging technologies and 82% of IT leaders are more likely to select an enterprise open source vendor that actively contributes to the open source community. Not only that, but 89% of IT leaders believe enterprise open source is as secure, or more secure, than proprietary technologies.
Even among its open source competitors, Postgres has continued to stand out. Combined, Postgres is the most loved and used database among developers, and has established itself as the most dynamic and powerful open source solution since Linux. It is the go-to database for enterprises looking to build truly modern open source applications wherever and however they want.
Let’s delve into why Postgres is well suited for these powerful initiatives, and how you can use it for both business growth and competitive advantage.
Postgres Fully Supports Mission-Critical Enterprise Applications
No matter your industry, ensuring that your database is constantly available must be a top priority. Should it fail, your mission-critical applications fail and, in turn, your business suffers. Unpredictable outages and unnecessary downtime not only affect your teams’ ability to achieve and innovate, but damage your reputation among customers, cause substantial revenue loss and hurt your standing in competitive markets.
Postgres is built to ensure high availability, so you can avoid unplanned downtime thanks to the database’s ability to rapidly switch between nodes when one unexpectedly goes down. Additionally, you can extend this functionality to limit the impact of scheduled maintenance outages, such as in the case of necessary database or application updates. This enhanced version of high availability is what we call “extreme high availability.” With the help of enterprise solutions and support services designed specifically for Postgres, your database can achieve:
- Near-zero-downtime maintenance and management capabilities.
- Multimaster replication and geographically distributed clusters without limitations on distance.
- Throughput up to five times faster than native logical replication.
- Increased flexibility in how you deploy your database.
But a database that’s always available is far from the extent of Postgres’s market-disrupting reputation. It’s also incredibly fast.
Postgres’s capabilities are designed to enhance all three of the most important performance metrics — speed, throughput and scaling — each of which plays a major role in your ability to be agile and run at full capacity.
It’s not just that Postgres is fast, however. The database’s extensibility allows businesses to grow and expand without worrying that their IT stack will buckle under the weight of their data or activity. No matter how many users need to access your applications, Postgres can handle the strain with ease. That’s why organizations as massive as Apple and Spotify feel comfortable entrusting their database functionality to Postgres. It’s also why startups in the midst of rapid growth find ongoing success with Postgres — it’s designed to accelerate with your business.
You Can Get More Value Out of Your Data than Any Other Database
Looking back at the many conversations we’ve had with Postgres users, new and veteran, the two words that come up the most are “freedom” and “control.”
An organization’s data is its most valuable asset. It powers applications, drives interactions with customers and provides business leaders with the insight they need to effectively innovate and grow. As such, being able to have full control over that data is a top priority. If your database restricts how you can access and leverage your assets, then that database is holding you back, plain and simple.
Take deployment, for example. As enterprises look to embrace more diverse and flexible database architectures, Postgres is proving to be their most valuable ally. In contrast to other database management solutions (DBMS), Postgres delivers a “single database everywhere” on any platform including self-managed private clouds and self-managed public clouds. This means organizations looking to embrace the increasingly visible benefits of hybrid cloud and multicloud infrastructures can do so with ease.
Compare that to legacy, proprietary database providers who have a financial incentive to limit what your architecture can look like, how you can store your data and, as a result, what you can actually do with your data. When your database infrastructure is captive to a single company, your future potential is drastically reduced.
The same goes for the tools you’re able to use. While Oracle might want you to use exclusively Oracle-built or -endorsed tools, Postgres’s massive integrational capacity places no such restrictions on your developers, architects, IT leaders and database administrators. As such, your teams are able to take advantage of a far wider range of software, both open source and proprietary, increasing the potential for how you can make use of your data and diversify your tech stack to practically infinite levels.
A Switch from Legacy Databases Helps You Achieve Extraordinary ROI
As discussed in the previous section, legacy, proprietary databases are increasingly being recognized for their frustrating limitations, despite their years of market domination. While proprietary legacy databases may still account for approximately $40 billion of the DBMS market, they can no longer claim to be technically superior to Postgres. Without that modernizing edge, their price tags are becoming increasingly unjustifiable in comparison to Postgres’s extraordinary return on investment (ROI), I — the most essential element of transformation initiatives.
The result is a wave of migration away from proprietary databases to open source alternatives, with Postgres as the dominant beneficiary of that shift.
While proprietary databases may boast an undeniable wealth of functionalities, the restrictions they put on their users, combined with ever-growing costs, result in a low ceiling for what businesses can achieve when relying on these solutions alone — especially if your enterprise doesn’t have bottomless pockets. Because your bill increases the more you achieve and the more data you accrue, by the time you reach your goals, you won’t be able to fully enjoy the benefits or reap the rewards. In short, you’re paying an arm and a leg, and maybe a little more, for the mistake of being ambitious.
Recently, we spoke with leaders from stc pay, a Middle East-based FinTech application that’s quickly become a regional leader, about their decision to choose Postgres rather than a big legacy provider.
“Looking at Microsoft or Oracle databases, it just wasn’t feasible from a cost perspective,” database team lead Ibrahim Kawash explained.
For companies like stc pay that are looking to see genuine ROI on their innovation, the choice is clear. Why shoulder exorbitant costs for a database that will only stymie the company’s growth?
It’s Time to Lead and Build with Postgres
As infrastructure modernization initiatives become an increasingly large priority for businesses looking to make a mark within their industries, it’s essential to invest in database solutions that will actually support those initiatives.
Trusted by household names like Mastercard, Ericsson and Reddit, Postgres is the database solution for enterprises that truly believe the sky is the limit.
And you don’t have to go at it alone!
With the help of EDB, thousands of organizations have discovered the full potential of Postgres, taking advantage of solutions ranging from powerful enterprise support to extreme high availability to fully managed Postgres in the cloud. Our team, including 40 active Postgres contributors, can help you build the architecture that’s perfect for your ambitions.
Join the innovators today.
Want to learn more about how to effectively migrate to and adopt Postgres? Read our e-book “7 Critical Success Factors for Moving to Open Source Databases (like Postgres).”
