Timescale Releases Third State of PostgreSQL Report

NEW YORK, July 29, 2022 — Timescale is proud to announce the results of its 2022 State of PostgreSQL survey. Timescale is the maker of TimescaleDB, the open-source relational database for time-series and one of the most popular PostgreSQL extensions. This year, nearly 1000 respondents participated in the 4-week survey providing developers unique insight into the PostgreSQL market.

The State of PostgreSQL survey provides more significant insights into PostgreSQL features and the broader PostgreSQL community. In 2019, the first edition of the report was released with feedback collated from over 500 developers. In 2021, the second edition of the report sampling close to 500 participants was released. In both years, respondents were mainly software developers/engineers, software architects, and database administrators from the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region accounting for 65% participation, North America  25.9%, and South America 7%.

“By organizing and delivering the State of PostgreSQL report, we help developers and developer-centric companies and communities better understand what is happening with Postgres today: the different types of Postgres users, the kinds of use cases they are tackling, the places they go to share and learn, how that is all changing, and the opportunities for improvement in the Postgres community overall,” said Ajay Kulkarni, Chief Executive Officer. “This also gives us an opportunity to give back to the broader PostgreSQL community, a community we are proud to be a part of and that has been very helpful to us.”

This year, as participation in the survey increased, so did the popularity of PostgreSQL. Key findings from this year’s report include why respondents use PostgreSQL, how they contribute to the community, adoption across organizations, and favorite tools and extensions.

Other highlights include:

Usage

Over three-quarters of respondents report using PostgreSQL for personal projects. 95% of all respondents use PostgreSQL at work, and 73.5% use Postgres for both personal and professional projects.

Why PostgreSQL?

Open source ranked as the #1 reason people choose PostgreSQL (19.3%), followed by reliability (16.5%) and extensions (9.9%). This shows that Open source continues to be a high value proposition for most users.

Contributions

44% of PostgreSQL users with 15+ years of experience have contributed to PostgreSQL at least once. Among those with less than 15 years of experience, only 12% have contributed to PostgreSQL. This percentage represents a great opportunity for the PostgreSQL community to welcome new people and ideas into the fold. (For more information, read our guide to contributing to PostgreSQL).

Ways Of Learning

The majority of respondents (76.2%) identified technical documentation as their preferred way of learning about PostgreSQL, followed by long-form blog posts (51.5%) and short-form blog posts (43.3%). Respondents with less than five years of PostgreSQL experience prefer video over long-form and short-form blog posts.

Extensions

One of the most powerful aspects of PostgreSQL is its rich extensibility model. Developers mix and match several purpose-built extensions to help them build more compelling applications. This year’s list of most favored extensions is stable compared to last year:

• PostGIS
• TimescaleDB
• pg_stat_statements
• pgcrypto
• pg_trgm

For more information see our blog post about the top PostgreSQL extensions.

Tools

Of the respondents who use tools to connect PostgreSQL for queries and administration tasks, psql (69.4%), pgAdmin (35.3%), and DBeaver (26.2%) were the top three choices. For more information, see our blog post on PostgreSQL tools, in addition to psql.

Deployment

Compared to 2019 and 2021, fewer respondents reported self-managing their PostgreSQL database. It appears that PostgreSQL users are increasingly using DBaaS providers for deploying PostgreSQL. Of those who deploy PostgreSQL as a Kubernetes container, 44% use Helm, 16% use Crunchy Operator, and 7% use Zalando Operator.

For more information and to view the full report, visit here.

About Timescale

Timescale is the creator of TimescaleDB; the industry-leading database for time-series. Tens of thousands of organizations trust TimescaleDB today with their mission-critical time-series applications. The company is dedicated to serving software developers and businesses worldwide, enabling them to build the next wave of computing. Timescale is a remote-first company with a global workforce and is backed by Tiger Global, Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Redpoint Ventures, Icon Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and other leading investors. For more information, visit www.timescale.com.

Source: Timescale