Our team at Tessell would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the vibrant community of Users, IT leaders, Contributors, and the people behind PostgreSQL who made PostgreSQL what it is today. Your passion and support have made PostgreSQL a versatile and robust database system. PostgreSQL is one of the only Open Source databases known for its relational, unstructured, columnar, and vector database functionalities.
As a young & dynamic DBaaS company, PostgreSQL has always remained our focal point. Reflecting on the year, we took big strides to make the adoption of PostgreSQL more seamless for our customers, and it also came with a fair share of learning while making PostgreSQL work for our customers.
Around June of 2023, Tessell had a big win at one of the major US banks to migrate & manage all of their managed databases sitting across two major public clouds with a landscape of more than 150+ PostgreSQL to migrate from AWS RDS to Tessell DBaaS.
While in India & APAC, we worked with various BFSIs, NBFCs, exchanges, and mobility verticals to showcase PostgreSQL capabilities. One of the marquee customer implementations happened around September 2023 when we migrated the PostgreSQL database for India’s largest Public state transport corporation booking & back office application to Tessell, PostgreSQL again shined like a star. Tessell today manages more than a million transactions daily on this database.
At one of the commodity exchanges in India, we had an interesting Cloud cost problem to solve, we not only bettered the Performance to cost ratio but also delighted the customer with what PostgreSQL can do in terms of resilience.
It always surprises me how far PostgreSQL has come along with a strong & ever-inspiring community. From a DIY/hobby database engine a few years ago to an enterprise-ready database engine surely the journey has been fascinating and also goes to show the power of community.
One trivia, Our own Tessell platform internally uses a lot of PostgreSQL for application metastore.
PostgreSQL’s Popularity
DB-Engines Rankings is widely recognized in the tech industry as a valuable tool for understanding trends and shifts in database technology. The rankings are updated monthly and provide insights into which databases are currently leading in terms of popularity and usage. To understand how the ranking is calculated, you may see this documentation. DB-Engines usually announces the DBMS of the Year upon comparing the popularity scores of January 2022 and January 2023.
And the great news is that PostgreSQL is the DBMS of the Year 2023. This success reflects the ever-growing community’s preference for open-source solutions that offer both scalability and security.
A Premier Vector Database & my experiments with it.
In 2023, PostgreSQL evolved into a leading vector database (did you imagine that? But what’s not possible for this community), with extensions like pgvector playing a crucial role. The popularity of the extension: pgvector surged, thanks to its advanced indexing capabilities, essential for efficient vector database management. Two notable index types popularizing this extension are IVFFlat and HNSW for Approximate Nearest Neighbor search to optimize Similarity search.
I got my hands on it in early September 2023 and then tried building a small LLM app (Chat application built on our internal contents); when the implementation started to excite me I thought why not build a full-fledged app around it that can help our internal teams generate content? More about it here.
Time Series Data
In 2023, we added support for time series data. The ever-growing adaption of time series databases pushed us to offer managed PostgreSQL with that capability at your fingertips.
At the time of writing this, we are engaged with a couple of customers for large-scale time series database implementation powered by our High-Performance offering on NVMe storage.
Oh, we love extensions. Who doesn't?
Around Aug 2023, we released first-class support for a host of PostgreSQL extensions for observability to data management to audit, and whatnot.
Major Release: PostgreSQL 16
On September 14, 2023, the PostgreSQL community witnessed the much-anticipated release of PostgreSQL 16. The community announces a major version usually in the last quarter of a year. This major version brought a lot of enhancements, focusing on improved performance, security, and user-friendly features. Among its key features were advanced query optimization techniques, better JSON handling capabilities, and enhanced partitioning functionality, all designed to cater to the diverse needs of modern applications.
A detailed blog about all the beautiful things in PostgreSQL 16 is on the way to our publishing house. Watch out for it.
Minor Versions Released in 2023
The PostgreSQL Community typically releases minor updates on the second Thursday of the second month in each quarter. However, this timing can vary, especially if there are critical issues urgent security vulnerabilities, or bugs that could impact data integrity, necessitating a quicker community response and release of fixes. In the year 2023, the following minor versions have been released for each of the major versions.
- PostgreSQL 16 – 16.1
- PostgreSQL 15 – 15.2, 15.3, 15.4, 15.5
- PostgreSQL 14 – 14.7, 14.8, 14.9, 14.10
- PostgreSQL 13 – 13.10, 13.11, 13.12, 13.13
- PostgreSQL 12 – 12.14, 12.15, 12.16, 12.17
- PostgreSQL 11 – 11.19, 11.20, 11.21, 11.22
You may visit the official documentation for the minor release roadmap for 2024.
PostgreSQL versions that are End of Life
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group follows a versioning policy. PostgreSQL 11 has seen its final release (11.22) on 9th Nov, 2023. This means that the Community would not provide any security or bug fixes for PostgreSQL 11 going forward. We recommend all PostgreSQL users plan for their PostgreSQL major version upgrades as soon as possible. The latest major versions always provide a variety of new features and performance improvements that can help us scale our database environments and improve user experience. Contact us today to get our support for PostgreSQL Upgrades or Optimizations.
Conclusion
As PostgreSQL continues to evolve, it remains steadfast in its commitment to excellence and innovation. The advancements made in 2023 are just a glimpse of its potential to revolutionize database management. We eagerly look forward to its continued growth and the new milestones it will undoubtedly achieve in 2024 and the years to come.
If you are looking to perform a POC for any of your PostgreSQL requirements, contact us today for a free technical assessment.
