Our love for PostgreSQL runs deep. We built our products on PostgreSQL, are proud members of the PostgreSQL community, and wouldn’t exist without it and the extensibility it provides.
In 2019, Timescale launched the first State of PostgreSQL report, advancing our desire to provide greater insights into the specificities and features useful to the PostgreSQL community. Following a one-year hiatus due to the pandemic and after the 2021 survey submissions, we released the 2021 report.
We are pleased to announce that the 2022 survey is now open for submissions! We are keen to learn more about how you use PostgreSQL for work and personal projects, how you deploy it, and how we can collectively improve it.
So, what have we learned from the two years we sent out our survey? You will find the few key findings here, but check out our reports for a full picture. From the most used programming languages to whether developers use PostgreSQL for work or personal projects (or both!), favorite features, and qualitative answers, The State of PostgreSQL paints an accurate and informative portrait of this great community.
Five hundred developers answered our survey in 2019, and 445 participated two years later. In both years, respondents mainly were software developers/engineers, software architects, and database administrators from the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region.
Around 67 % of developers said they were using the database “more” or “a lot more” in 2019, compared to 52 % in 2021. However, the number of participants using it “about the same” increased from 31 % in 2019 to 43 % in 2021.
Building applications is the primary use case for PostgreSQL developers, totaling 70 % in 2019 and 67 % in 2021.
Code contributions are crucial to open-source software development, and PostgreSQL successfully mobilizes its community. In 2019, about 9 % of respondents contributed their code to the database, and 11 % claimed to do it two years later.
In both surveys, developers said that reliability and SQL were the main reasons they use PostgreSQL.
In 2019, 51 % of respondents deployed PostgreSQL using AWS, while 46 % relied on a self-managed data center. In 2021, the self-managed option took the lead, with 36.4 % deploying on-site, 35.3 % from a private data center, and 32.8 % on a public cloud. In 2021, AWS was the leading cloud provider, with 46.1 % of the answers.
If you’ve got any feedback or questions on The State of PostgreSQL, let us know on Twitter or join Timescale’s Community Slack and message us in #general.
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