Postgres is now the #1 database choice among developers

Like many in the Postgres world we were excited to see in the just released Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey that Postgres is now the most used database across the 90,000+ developers surveyed.

Postgres is used by 46% of all the survey respondents, edging out MySQL for the first time. This is up from 36% just three years ago. Moreover a whopping 43% of respondents who are not using Postgres expressed a desire to begin using it – far in excess of the “desired” numbers for any other database.

It’s worth thinking about what has contributed to this growing popularity.   Here at pgEdge we believe the flexibility provided by the Postgres extension model has a lot to do with it.  Popular extensions make it possible to use Postgres in domains where it might otherwise be less than suitable: for instance GIS (with PostGIS), or where a time series database is needed (TimescaleDB), or AI and ML (with pgvector and PostgresML).  We ourselves use the Postgres extension mechanism for Spock, which allows Postgres to operate in fully distributed multi-master clusters for low latency and ultra high availability.

The vibrant and extremely talented and committed developer community who keep advancing Postgres is also a major factor.   The enterprise hardening and careful and methodical development of Postgres over the years have surely contributed to Postgres being suitable for a much wider variety of workloads than in years past.

We also noted in the survey that for the first time edge platforms like Cloudflare, Vercel and Netlify were cited as cloud platforms in use by respondents, coming in at 15%, 11% and 9% respectively. As the vendor of one of the few distributed databases demonstrated to work with edge platforms like Cloudflare Workers we are excited to see their growing usage.  You can learn more about how to use pgEdge with platforms like Cloudflare workers here and here.

We couldn’t be more thrilled to see this continued growth in Postgres usage alongside growing interest in these edge-oriented cloud platforms.  If you want to learn more about how we bring these worlds together, sign up here for a demo of pgEdge Cloud, or download pgEdge Platform.