PostgreSQL 2022 Report: Rising popularity, open source, reliability and scaling key

Timescale recently released a 2022 State of PostgreSQL Survey.The survey ran from June 6 to June 30, 2022, and received responses from 992 developers around the world.The State of PostgreSQL Survey provides some key insights into PostgreSQL capabilities and the wider PostgreSQL community.

The first edition of the report, released in 2019, gathered feedback from more than 500 developers, and the second edition in 2021 also sampled nearly 500 participants.Respondents from EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) accounted for about half of all respondents, followed by North America at 25.9%, according to the two-year survey results.

In addition to sending surveys to past participants, Timescale is also on social media, email newsletters (their own and 3rd parties), TimescaleDB and PostgreSQL Slack channels, the PostgreSQL mailing list, Reddit, and Hacker News.Compared with the previous two times, the number of people participating in the survey has increased this year.Key findings from the report include: why respondents use PostgreSQL, how they contribute to the community, adoption across organizations, and favorite tools and extensions.

"By organizing and publishing PostgreSQL status reports, we help developers and developer-focused companies and communities better understand what's going on with Postgres: different types ofPostgres users, the types of use cases they're working on, where they've been to share and learn, how this has all changed, and the opportunities for improvement across the Postgres community, which also gives us an opportunity to give back to the wider PostgreSQL community, which we're proud ofBeing a part of this community has been very helpful to us."

Some highlights of the report include:

• DB engines According to the data, PostgreSQL is becoming more and more popular.The number of new PostgreSQL users who have tried the database for less than a year has grown from 6.1% in 2021 to 6.4% in 2022.

• Open source is the number one reason why people choose PostgreSQL (19.3%), followed by reliability (16.5%) and scalability (9.9%).The report notes that reasons for choosing PostgreSQL vary with experience.For those who have used PostgreSQL for less than 5 years, open source is the most important factor in their choice of PostgreSQL; for those who have used PostgreSQL for 6-10 years, reliability and open source are both important; 11-15 years of people choose PostgreSQL mainly because of its reliability.

• 44% of PostgreSQL users with 15+ years of experience have contributed to PostgreSQL at least once."In fact, regardless of their experience, all users contribute to the PostgreSQL community."
• 55% of respondents said PostgreSQL is being used more today than it was a year ago.
• Over three-quarters of respondents said they use PostgreSQL for personal projects, 95% use PostgreSQL at work, and 74% use PostgreSQLFor personal and professional projects.
• The majority of respondents (76.2%) said technical documentation was their preferred way to learn PostgreSQL, followed by long blog posts (51.5%) and short blog posts (43.3%).Respondents with less than 5 years of PostgreSQL experience prefer videos to blog posts.
• In terms of community engagement, more than 20% of respondents reported difficulties using the PostgreSQL mailing list as their primary way of interacting with the core team and the project as a whole.Respondents indicated that mailing lists are one of the ways they keep in touch with the community.Some other channels of engagement include Slack (10%), Stack Overflow (8%), blogs (8%), Twitter (6%) and Reddit (6%).
• Respondents also shared some of their favorite PostgreSQL extensions.The top rankings are:
  • PostGIS
  • TimescaleDB
  • pg_stat_statements
  • pgcrypto
  • pg_trgm
  • Citus
  • uuid-ossp
• SQL, Python, Java, shell scripting, and JavaScript/TypeScript are listed as the most commonly used languages ​​to access PostgreSQL.PostgreSQL users with 0-5 years of experience are more likely to use JavaScript or TypeScript than Java; users with 6+ years of experience are more likely to use shell scripts to access the database.
• Psql (69.4%), pgAdmin (35.3%) and DBeaver (26.2%) were the top three respondents who used tools to connect to PostgreSQL for query and administrative tasksbit selection.
• Grafana, pgAdmin, and DBeaver are the most likely visualization tools.
• Compared to 2019 and 2021, fewer respondents said they would self-manage their PostgreSQL database.It seems that PostgreSQL users are increasingly using DBaaS providers to deploy PostgreSQL.Of those deploying PostgreSQL as a Kubernetes container, 44% use Helm, 16% use the Crunchy Operator, and 7% use the Zalando Operator.

More details can be view the full report.