The Proof is in the Survey: Developers Love Postgres

As the essential drivers behind application innovation, developers are the heartbeat of an organization. But, in order for them to do their jobs to the fullest extent, they need flexibility, freedom and a database that will grow along with their and their business’ ambitions.

For this reason, among many others, developers love Postgres. Providing full control over your data and the ability to both shape your architecture and evolve your applications as you see fit, Postgres—in both its community and enterprise iterations—is the ideal database for the best developers.

The latest Stack Overflow Developer survey bears this out.

Postgres is the developer’s database

Recently published, Stack Overflow’s overview of key developer priorities included many Postgres-relevant headlines:

• Developers use Postgres more than any other database: Professional developers are using Postgres more than MySQL, MongoDB, MariaDB or Redis. While MySQL used to build on its legacy install base and traditionally held the #1 spot as the most used database technology, Postgres has now taken the lead as the most popular database with professional developers 
• Developers love Postgres even more than they love to use Redis or MongoDB: Traditionally, Redis used to hold the top spot in the “most wanted category” but now Postgres has taken that spot too.
• Developers who are not currently using Postgres, want to use Postgres more so than they would want to use Mongo, Redis, or ElasticSearch 

None of these stats are a surprise for Postgres advocates. They also provide critical insight into Postgres’ role in infrastructure modernization and the evolving application stack. Modern enterprise application architectures are different—one of the key distinctions is that they must be conducive to rapid innovation cycles and attractive to high-performance application developers.

The fact that developers have declared Postgres to be the most loved, most wanted and most used database makes it much easier to attract the most valuable technical talent and innovate faster.

Postgres fits developers

Postgres has one of the most evolved data models in the database world. When Dr. Michael Stonebraker and his team designed Postgres at Berkeley over 30 years ago, they made sure that the underlying data model was inherently extensible. At the time, databases could only use very simple data types, like numbers, strings and dates. Dr. Stonebraker and his team made a fundamental design decision to make Postgres extensible and make it easy to add new data types and their associated operations. For example, PostGIS is an extension of Postgres that makes it easy to work with geographic data elements, polygons, routes and more. That has made Postgres one of the preferred solutions for geolocation-aware systems. Other well known data model additions are for document (JSON) and key-value pairs (HSTORE).

This visionary decision, taken 30 years ago, is the foundation for why developers love Postgres today. The extensible data model, together with the fact that it runs on every cloud and operating system and has a vibrant multi-company development community enables developers to be enormously productive and innovative.

Use Postgres—get stuff done!

Want to learn more about Postgres’ power and enduring appeal? Check out EDB CEO Ed Boyajian’s 2022 Postgres Vision Keynote here.