Recently I met some of our customers in South East Asia region. Meetings were mostly to understand their business challenges/requirements and to help them come up with solution to overcome those challenges. Most of the time customers were interested to know more about capabilities of PostgreSQL database and how it could be leveraged more effectively for running business critical application workload.
Though cost has been one of the starting factors for organizations to consider moving to PostgreSQL database but very soon they discover many more benefits of Postgres adoption. Let’s look at some of them.
1. Ease of Migration-
Many organizations have their legacy database running on proprietary RDBMS systems. Maintenance and licensing cost of these database system eat up major portion of budget allocated for IT spends. Hence they are migrating to more economical database, PostgreSQL which is at par to proprietary RDBMS when it comes to features and easier to adopt due to its oracle compatibility layer. Organizations running their current workload on Oracle database can seamlessly migrate to Postgres using EDB’s migration toolkit. As Postgres supports PLSQL language, applications written for Oracle can be migrated with almost no change.
With the costs saved on licensing and maintenance of proprietary RDBMS, organizations are now looking at more innovative and revenue generating next-gen applications, Big Data ideas and so on.
2. More for less-
Many Organizations that have been using Oracle like proprietary RDBMS have to pay for features they do not use. That is where Postgres is best alternative because with Postgres all major features come as a part of core product with no extra cost. Postgres provides greater scalability, HA configuration using streaming replication, automated failover features in Master-slave configuration. Organizations aiming to achieve 24*7 availability for their database systems sees Postgres as one of their choices of database.
Postgres has JSON and HSTORE data type which provides developers, a schemaless data management option that is fully integrated with Postgres’ ACID model. This gives flexibility to
the developer to design schema that can use relational and NoSQL capabilities of database on same platform. All in all, organizations are getting more our out of their IT investments by opting for open source database with minimum worry because of the kind of support available.
3. Capabilities –
There has been rise of 3 V’s (Volume, Velocity and Variety of Data) in today’s ever evolving technological world. Huge amount of data is getting generated though Web, Mobile and IoT based applications and the speed of data generation is tremendous. The challenge with the data is, it is accessible only through applications specific to the database. Data resides in heterogeneous data stores that could be proprietary and open source RDBMS, NoSQL, Hadoop data platform. With the rise of new heterogeneous database systems, it has introduced new data types. Businesses are looking at using this organization-wide data to drive incremental revenue, reduce operational cost, understand customer behaviour and improve customer experience.
This is where Postgres database’s integration capability scores high on many of the proprietary RDBMS systems. Postgres has come up with two new features which aids seamless integration namely,
a. Postgres Plus Advance Replication Server – EDB’s Postgres Plus replication server offers flexible replication solution. This functionality allows you to integrate data from other Postgres, Oracle and SQL server, achieve high availability. This feature can also be used to offload reporting workload from main OLTP database to Postgres database and improve read, write performance on production database.
b. Postgres Data Adapter – Postgres Data adapter enables read/write data from other databases including MongoDB, Hadoop and MySQL and access it as if native Postgres tables. This capability of Postgres allows developers to write join on remote tables along with local Postgres tables and query it from Postgres itself.
4. Cloud adoption-
To reduce the infrastructure cost, more and more organizations are moving their servers to cloud so that they only have to spend on operational cost. One of the biggest benefits of cloud is that you can scale up your servers almost immediately when demand goes up and shut down the servers when the workload is low. Postgres is compatible with many cloud platforms available in the market and have its own Postgres cloud so organizations already using cloud still find it easy to migrate to Postgres due to compatibility with other cloud vendors.
These are various reasons that has made enterprises in SEA region to look at Postgres as not just a low cost alternative to Oracle but a RDBMS that is capable of managing the OLTP workload, integrate with other heterogeneous RDBMS, NoSQL without much complex configuration. My observation is that Postgres has become the first choice of database for new applications being set up. And once Postgres is tried and tested against it, customers increasingly have started moving their existing proprietary database system to Postgres.
Sushant Pawar I Database Solution Consultant, Ashnik