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EDB Postgres and Your Enterprise Data

The trend of adopting open-source technologies by enterprise-grade organizations remains on the rise. This is markedly true in the area of database technologies.

Consider the following forecasts by Gartner with regard to the continuous adoption of open-source technologies and Open-source DBMS (OSDBMS):

“By 2019, OSDBMS technology will account for more than 10% of DBMS spending, reflecting accelerating adoption by enterprise users.

By 2022, more than 70% of new in-house applications will be developed on an OSDBMS, and 50% of existing commercial RDBMS instances will have been converted or will be in process of converting.

Through 2020, relational technology will continue to be used for at least 85% of new applications and projects.

Through 2020, open-source software in IT portfolios will increase at a 30% compound annual growth rate.

By 2022, more than 60% of all global organizations will improve their internal skills related to open source to enable better use of open source in production, which represents an increase from 20% in 2018.” [Gartner, State of the Open-Source DBMS Market, 2018, 02-28-2018]

EDB Postgres: The viable OSDMS alternative to proprietary and commercial solutions.

Postgres has been the RDBMS of choice of many government and private enterprises for over 25 years. Government agencies depend on Postgres to deliver robust, secure applications for the public. In private companies, industries included in the extensive Postgres portfolio include financial services, insurance, health care, energy, media, retail, telco and pharma. [Which Postgres Is Right For Me?]

The following signify the reasons for this confidence in Postgres:

Robust OLTP engine – Postgres’ database engine combines ACID transaction guarantees with referential integrity, advanced subquery processing and other enterprise-class features.

Rich, expressive data types – Postgres supports a broad range of data types, including multi-dimensional arrays and user-defined types. Postgres also provides indexing and query operations on JSON data, matching or exceeding the functionality of NoSQL document stores for many use cases.

Advanced concurrency control – Postgres maintains data consistency through multiversion concurrency control (MVCC), allowing database read and write operations to execute optimistically, without blocking each other.

Stored procedure flexibility – Postgres has loadable modules that enable database developers to write stored procedures in popular programming languages such as Java, C, Perl, Python, Ruby and even JavaScript.

Community ecosystem – In addition to delivering bug fixes and enhancements for the core Postgres database, the extended Postgres community provides a broad range of add-on products and services. [ibid]

It is undeniable that Postgres is uniquely poised to act as the open source database backend for many sophisticated applications. However, many organizations require the enterprise class features and support that are missing in the community version.

EDB is the global leader in providing enterprise-class products and services for Postgres users.

EDB’s collaborative efforts within the Postgres community have been going on for over 10 years, initiatives that include the funding of research projects and contribution of core database functionality to the open source code base. As a highly-esteemed community partner, it is a major influence in the future direction of Postgres.

EDB offers two Postgres-based product subscriptions:

EDB Postgres Standard (EPS) – This subscription, based on the open source PostgreSQL database, provides technical support and mission-critical tools needed for enterprise class deployments. EPS is generally geared toward departments and smaller organizations building mixed-workload applications.

EDB Postgres Enterprise (EPE) – Leveraging the Postgres database core, EPE combines enterprise technical support SLAs and product roadmap influence with a wealth of high- value product features. EPE is geared toward organizations that need to build and manage durable, scalable, high performance database applications. EPE also includes advanced security and performance features in addition to a renowned suite of Oracle® compatibility capabilities that accelerate Postgres adoption in Oracle shops. [ibid]

Advantages

Referencing the IDC (International Data Corporation) report entitled, The Economic and Business Advantages of EDB Postgres Database Solutions, wherein key organizations that have adopted EDB Postgres were assessed, it was determined that benefits in the following areas were realized: Business Value, DBA Staff Efficiencies, and Database-Related Costs.

Realizing Business Value With EDB Postgres

Lower cost-of-operation expenses (42% lower across three years) by virtue of the elimination of database-related licensing fees and lower maintenance costs (EDB’s opex-based pricing model as opposed to capex-weighted licensing models) enabled organizations to be more flexible and scalable in their use of database technology, thereby lending reliability and performance to the solutions that support their business operations.

The following are the ways these organizations are realizing value by leveraging EDB Postgres as a high-performance, cost-efficient database platform to better capitalize on business opportunities:

Scalability – EDB Postgres enables organizations to scale their database resources to match business demand. In particular, organizations do not face limitations imposed by up-front capex costs when they need to build new databases or expand a database. A database manager explained: “The scalability of EDB Postgres is a real benefit. We just started with the platform for customers to do queries on our databases, and we can very easily scale this up and down depending on the demand of our clients, which is difficult to predict. We shoot to be flexible and offer high scalability, and EDB Postgres can do this against relatively low costs. It would be far more difficult with another platform.”

Flexibility – EDB helps organizations avoid vendor lock-in by providing an open source–based alternative to other database solutions and gives them more flexibility to find enterprise data solutions that match their business and operational needs. A database manager commented: “We are always looking for alternative technology just in case our current technology proves to be a dead end or bottleneck in performance, which led us to EnterpriseDB.”

Cost impact – Beyond paying less for their database environments, organizations can embed lower database costs in their pricing and better compete because the overall cost of operating EDB Postgres databases is lower than the overall cost of operating their previous or alternative solutions. A database manager explained: “We are better able to sell to new customers in this new space. Without EDB Postgres, we could go after them, but we wouldn’t win them.”

Integration – EDB Postgres offers the ability to integrate with a number of Big Data analytics solutions, which can enable application development efforts and help tie Big Data analytics more closely to improved business and operational outcomes. A database manager noted: “As we come up with crazy query requirements for our application development, it’s easier to get [them] done and faster with EDB Postgres.” [The Economic and Business Advantages of EDB Postgres Database Solutions]

These EDB Postgres attributes paved the way for the following positive business results:

More revenue and more customers – A database manager at one interviewed organization explained: “EDB Postgres allows us to be not only the best provider in the world but the lowest-cost provider. That’s the best way to describe it … We’re bringing in substantially more revenue because it has allowed us to take new contracts.”

Increased database functionality – Another database manager commented: “EDB Postgres gives us the ability to expand the type of databases that we’re actually interacting with. In that sense, it gives us a flexibility that says I don’t have to be tied to this other database or a particular database. We can do functionality in multiple databases. For us, that’s key. It gives us flexibility.” [ibid]

As a result of EDB Postgres being a reliable and robust database platform, these organizations have also reported fewer unplanned, database-related outages and shorter resolution times (62% lower impact of such unplanned outages on their operations with EDB Postgres over three years).

Achieving DBA Staff Efficiencies

Another benefit realized was in the area of database administration. The ease of deployment and management of EDB Postgres environments resulted in an average of 15% less deployment, configuration, maintenance, and administration time, measured in a span of  three years, as compared to competing database technologies (16% more efficient administration). The respondents reported that it was the platform’s simplicity that undergirded these improvements.

As a database manager at one organization noted:

“There is a significant difference in DBA staff time with [our alternative database environment] — 10 hours per week with EDB Postgres compared with 40 hours per week previously … EnterpriseDB is a much simpler model and is built to be operated without dedicated operators — it’s not built on the premise of having people with deep knowledge about the database.” [ibid]

Reducing Database-Related Costs

It is precisely in two areas that EDB Postgres showcases maximum profitability in terms of database-related costs:

• No exorbitantly-priced, up-front licensing costs. This is particularly the bane of the majority of commercial database solutions.
  
• Lower annual subscription rates. This translates to cost savings realized across more than three years in comparison to the organization’s prior or competing traditional or open source database technologies.

Conclusion

Adopting EDB Postgres, either as a greenfield implementation or migration initiative, is not a mere instance of jumping on the open-source bandwagon. While it is a fact that many may have had to settle for trade-offs in moving to open-source database management systems, trade-offs in terms of performance degradation and awkward administration for lower cost, this is never the case for any organization that decides to embrace EDB Postgres.

In fact, these organizations will reap the benefits of their systems running faster, easier to administer, and providing more flexibility than the systems they had used previously. EDB Postgres, aside from providing the standard benefits of open source, is the go-to solution to the problem of expensive, unduly complex, and poor performing database platforms.

EDB Postgres is the future.