I attended the Enterprise Postgres Day 2019 at the nice location of Westergasfabriek, Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the morning sessions till 1 PM, but it seems enough to get a good impression.  For those who are not familiar with the difference between Postgres and EnterpriseDB: roughly speaking, EnterpriseDB is the supported version of the Open Source database Postgres. Hope I don’t offend somebody with that definition.

And inevitable I bumped into Jan Karremans – Director Sales Engineering – , who is presenting about EnterpriseDB at Qualogy in September. Looking forward to this.

The kick-off was performed by the Guest Speaker (Coen Jutte), a ‘musician & change expert’ (..), and the main compound of his performance was to get us – the audience – out of our comfort-zone and get in our learning-zone. And this was of course all related to convince the decision-makers to step away of Oracle – or other databases – and change to Postgres…. Quite entertaining though, and it got us – the audience – loosened up a bit.

Next on  line:  Ed Boyajian, CEO of EnterpriseDB with ‘The Future is now’.

Some takeaways:

– Constant growth over the last 10 years.

– Relational databases are not dead (nice to hear this), but keep growing in popularity(!), Postgres is the fourth database product after Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft.

– Third technology running on Docker, coming to that later on.

Maturity of EDB postgres: performance/scalability, pluggable storage, replication server and the deployment in the cloud and on containers.

– A lot of customers are migrating from Oracle to Postgres. No figures were mentioned, but I met a former colleague-Oracle DBA doing this at the moment. Had some challenges with procedures and monitoring by the way.

– Easy deployment in every cloud or on-premises.

The following presentations were more technical and all about Docker and Kubernetes. And this was quite remarkable for me, as it appears that Postgres has a strategy to deploy production databases on containers with Kubernetes. And as an Oracle guy, I would not recommend an Oracle database on a container, mainly because of the difficult separation between storage and instance, and the temporary nature of a container. But….. Oracle is not the same as Postgres.

Postgres is using the so-called ‘statefulset’ of Kubernetes:  a ‘workload API object used to manage stateful applications.’  In the High Availability Architecture  the ‘streaming replication’ function of Postgres is also used.

Funny, and nice to see that a senior vice president of EnterpriseDB (field CTO) held a deep technical presentation about advanced database patterns for Kubernetes. Concepts like ‘Service Mesh’, ‘Side Cars’ and ‘Operators’ were used in the slides,  no word of marketing in it….

All together a useful day, like to get more knowledge about Postgres and Kubernetes…  There’s some work to do!