Postgres Will Become a Cornerstone of The World's Modern IT Ecosystem

By Oleg Bartunov, Co-founder and CEO of Postgres Professional

PostgreSQL is one of the most popular relational database management systems (RDBMSs) on the market, according to StackOverflow.  It's exciting to see Postgres becoming a cornerstone of the world's modern IT ecosystem, its popularity will continue to grow in the coming year, as the PostgreSQL community advances this open source database's functionality and expands its uses.  Below, I provide just a few of the converging trends and technology advancements that are putting PostgreSQL on a steep trajectory.

Adaptation to the Cloud

Companies are taking PostgreSQL to the cloud and creating Kubernetes operators for Postgres -- in other words, Postgres will be with us for many years to come, continually responding to new challenges related to cloud infrastructures, increasing workloads and growing volumes of data.

A Jack of All Trades - for Both SQL and NoSQL

Going beyond the traditional RDBMS concept is a persistent trend, and in 2021, more work will be done on the new columnar storage system for Postgres users. This will certainly add a new dimension to PostgreSQL in terms of search, indexing and performance, and move it closer to an all-in-one database good for a variety of tasks.  

Strategically, the PostgreSQL community will continue to work on improving four core characteristics: reliability, performance, scalability and interoperability. We expect more developments focusing on these to become available next year. Even if they do not become a part of the Postgres core for now, they might work as extensions or templates, like Patroni powering up PostgreSQL-based HA solutions. 

Faster Solutions for Large Volumes of Data

Data compression and operations on large tables will continue to be a primary focus in 2021. The PostgreSQL community invests considerable effort into enhancements related to partitioning. Release 13 introduced partition-wide join improvements, replication of the partitioned tables, and some other long-awaited features, and we expect release 14 to add more to partitioning.

Interoperability for Modern Environments

Many users come to the PostgreSQL world from web projects, and they are interested in semi-structured data and the JSON data type. We need to meet their needs and make Postgres even friendlier to this category of users. In 2021, our team will continue to improve JSON-related functionality in PostgreSQL and work on ensuring compliance with the SQL standard. This will result in better interoperability, which is crucial for modern multi-database environments.

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About the Author

Oleg Bartunov is the co-founder and CEO of Postgres Professional, the company that makes PostgreSQL enterprise-ready. A major contributor to PostgreSQL, Bartunov has been using PostgreSQL since 1995 and has been developing and promoting PostgreSQL since 1996. His PostgreSQL contributions include the locale support, GiST, GIN and SP-GiST extensibility infrastructures, full text search, KNN, NoSQL features (hstore and jsonb) and several extensions including fuzzy search, support for tree-like structures and arrays. In addition to his work with Postgres Professional, Bartunov is a research scientist at Lomonosov Moscow State University and a professional astronomer.