How do you choose who provides the support or deployment solution you need for your business-critical applications?
An often overlooked factor is whether the company is committed to contributing upstream to PostgreSQL and the other open source technologies they support.
Technology and community contributions by the company and their employees to the supported open source software matters.
It indicates the company is committed to the long-term success of the software that you’ll be using to host your operations. If your team runs into issues, compatibility errors, bugs, or other problems, you need a company that will ensure that the situation will be resolved in a timely manner for your team.
A company that contributes can do this not only where your data is hosted, but also upstream at a source code level to make sure the problem is fully taken care of. This applies as well to feature requests or problems with compatibility—if there’s a real need or use case for a certain functionality, you’d be working with the actual developers who could make a difference in the technology you’re using for mission-critical operations. Further, you can trust a company that contributes to have in-depth knowledge of the system—ensuring your database systems are configured efficiently for cost effectiveness and performance, security and disaster recovery, and minimization of day-to-day maintenance and typical DBA operations.
To this end, EDB conducted an analysis of code contributions to PostgreSQL as of the PostgreSQL 15 release in September 2022, by company. To do this, the release notes were referenced as well as the list of contributors/committers to the PostgreSQL project to identify companies that supported the majority of each contributor’s employment during the PG15 development lifecycle. Each individual named was researched and their companies determined using LinkedIn, the PostgreSQL mailing lists, or similar trusted sources. All companies that had more than one contributor—not including unknown or independent contributions—are shown here. This list came to a total of 144 companies and 448 individuals that contributed to the initial PostgreSQL 15 release, including core team members, major contributors, named contributors, PostgreSQL 15 contributors, and committers.
These kinds of results can be found by your team by taking the time to research release notes for major and minor releases of the software. Further analysis can be conducted through asking questions like:
Does the company support their employees in participating in the community through code or non-code contributions?
Do they have a visible open source policy or other public statements around the subject?
Published content by the company or their employees, such as blog posts, webinars, podcasts, or documentation can be used as well when ensuring that you’d be receiving the optimum level of tailored expertise.
Take your time to investigate and choose a partner who is actively involved with Postgres. If they don’t contribute, they can’t provide the deep level of support needed to maintain business operations effectively.
EDB provides a number of PostgreSQL services and solutions, including 24x7 support, PostgreSQL training, fully managed PostgreSQL-as-a-service in public and multi cloud environments, and multi-master replication for highly available infrastructure. We also fully believe and invest in PostgreSQL—read more about the number of ways we contribute to the PostgreSQL project and ecosystem.
Reach out to us today to schedule a consultation. We're looking forward to working with you to achieve your goals.