Meet Jozef de Vries, the mastermind behind the cutting-edge product development at EnterpriseDB (EDB), a pioneering company revolutionizing Postgres in the enterprise domain.
With over 15 years of experience before joining EDB, Jozef has held various positions at IBM, including building the IBM Cloud Database development organization from the ground up.
In this quick Q&A, Jozef shares how enterprises can leverage Postgres to cater to their database needs and how this open-source platform is shaking up the market.
M.R. Rangaswami: In your opinion, how will Postgres disrupt the open-source database market?
Jozef de Vries: Postgres already has disrupted the database market. The only question that remains is how quickly Postgres will take a majority share of the enterprise database market. EDB is exclusively focused on accelerating the adoption of Postgres as the database standard in the enterprise.
Combined, Postgres is the most loved, most used, and most wanted database in the world. According to StackOverflow surveys of developers, its growth is exponential in 2022 and beyond.
Postgres is the fastest-growing database management system in what Gartner views as an approximately $80 billion market. EDB customers such as MasterCard, Nielsen, Siemens, Sony, Ericsson and others have made Postgres their database standard.
EDB builds Postgres alongside a vibrant community, disrupting the market with greater scalability and cost savings compared to any other system. With more contributors to Postgres than any other company, EDB delivers unparalleled expertise and power to enterprises looking to adopt Postgres as their database standard.
M.R.: How does Postgres (as an open-source object-relational database system) function?
Jozef: Postgres addresses the widest range of modern applications more than any other database today. This means that enterprises that run on Postgres can fundamentally transform their economics, build better applications with greater performance, scalability and security.
When Postgres was designed at the University of California, Berkeley more than 30 years ago, its designers 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. Michael Stonebreaker, one of EDB’s distinguished advisors and strategists, and his team made a fundamental design decision to make Postgres 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, etc. That alone has made Postgres one of the preferred solutions for mapping systems. Other well known extensions are for document stores (JSON) and key value pairs (HSTORE).
This extensible data model, together with the ability to run on every cloud, enables Postgres developers to be enormously productive and innovative.
Alongside a robust independent open-source community, we have made Postgres an extraordinary database, superior to legacy proprietary databases and more universally applicable for developers than specialty databases.
Open source mandates, flexible deployment options, risk mitigation and strong security will drive much broader adoption of Postgres this year and next. EDB supports this with built-in Oracle migration capabilities, unmatched Postgres expertise and 24/7 global support. We uniquely empower enterprises to accelerate strategies, move applications to the cloud and build new applications on Postgres.
M.R.: What are the factors accelerating or inhibiting the adoption rate of Postgres?
Jozef: Purpose-built for general use, Postgres powers enterprises across a wider variety and broader spectrum of applications than any other database, making it the economic game changer for data. There will always be specialty applications that require specialty databases. But for an enterprise standard, developers and IT executives rely on Postgres for the widest range of support.
Postgres technology is extraordinary and is improving faster than competing technologies, thanks to the independent nature of the community and EDB’s relentless commitment to Postgres innovation and development. Our technology approach delivers a “single database everywhere” to any platform including self-managed private clouds and self-managed public clouds, but our fully managed public cloud is the most important accelerator. The fact that we simultaneously deliver breathtaking cost reductions is the icing on the cake.
Additionally, the fact that more developers love, use and want Postgres than any other database in the world is an important “tell” on this prediction.
Developers and business leaders alike seek data ownership and control and they simply don’t have time—or money—to waste. That is why they need a Postgres acceleration strategy, and only EDB can provide that.
Inhibitors to the adoption of Postgres are primarily awareness, staff education and training — all areas that the C-Suite can play a big leadership role in changing. Great leaders recognize the need for expertise from a company that deeply understands Postgres and enables them to run data anywhere. That’s EDB.
Our business is built to remove barriers. Some of the biggest companies in the world including Apple, Daimler, Goldman Sachs, and others have already adopted Postgres as their database standard. It’s not a matter of if, but when the majority of enterprises will follow suit.
M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com