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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

So a company that sells PostgreSQL services thinks PostgreSQL is dominating. Brilliant.

The reality is that nothing is dominating. In 2021 there were more databases than ever each addressing a different use case. Companies don't have just one EDW they will have dozens even hundreds of siloed data stores. Startups will start with one for everything, then split out auth, user analytics, telemetry etc

There is no evidence of any consolidation in the market. And definitely not some mass trend towards PostgreSQL.

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Couple of points:

1. Ottertune doesn't sell PostgreSQL services, they sell a database optimization service that happens to support PostgreSQL (and other databases like MySQL)

2. PostgreSQL is definitely gaining market shares and fast, see the db-engine graph [1], you can compare it to the oracle trend if you are not convinced [2]

[1] https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/PostgreSQL

[2] https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/system/Oracle

Is this ranking by # of orgs using Postgres, or relative total company value using Postgres, or some even more ambiguous effectiveness metric?

Answer: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_definition

A DB system that works for professionals and doesn't require any public ecosystem of training materials won't be mentioned much in public.

thats likely why they're also including mentions in job postings in their metric

> Number of job offers, in which the system is mentioned

its not a silver bullet, but I do think its at least somewhat representative of popularity.

they sell a database optimization service that happens to support PostgreSQL (and other databases like MySQL)

A ML program that automatically tunes your production database in real-time. What could possibly go wrong?

We are very careful to make sure that we don't allow the tuning algorithms to make changes that could be detrimental to the correctness or availability of the database. This blog article describes some of the safeguards that we employ:

https://ottertune.com/blog/prevent-machine-learning-from-wre...

We also advise our customers to not point OtterTune at a production database right away.

You can't just compare graphs like that without factoring in the cloud. PostgreSQL is a first-class, cloud managed, supported database in the top three cloud providers whereas Oracle is not. It's a massive impediment to adoption and is in no way a reflection of the database itself.

Either way nothing to suggest that PostgreSQL is any way dominating.

Postgresql is also well supported as a managed offering for PAAS offerings as well.

Heroku has https://www.heroku.com/postgres

Fly.io - https://fly.io/docs/reference/postgres/

and lots more of these pretty small players - that still drive adoption.

Then it's very well support on AWS / GCP / Azure

So postgresql is just crushing it in terms of adoption.

I honestly have not seen major Oracle offering in a bit.

Looking at what tech companies are building on is oracle a major player these days. They used to be THE pretty much only player - those days feel gone by now.

Your own comment suggests that Postgres is dominating over Oracle, simply by saying that it’s been adopted as a major offering by the top 3 cloud providers. How is that not a reflection of the database?

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