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>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE,
with digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021,
brought to you by EDB.
>> Well, good day, everybody.
John Walls here on theCUBE,
and continuing our CUBE conversation
as part of Postgres Vision 2021, sponsored by EDB,
with EDB Chief Technology Officer, Mr. Mark Linster.
Mark, good morning to you.
How are you doing today?
>> I'm doing very fine, very good, sir.
>> Excellent. Excellent.
Glad you could join us.
And we appreciate the time, chance, to look at what's going
on in this world of data, which, as you know,
continues to evolve quite rapidly.
So let's just take that 30,000-foot perspective here
to begin with here, and let's talk about data,
and management,
and what Postgres is doing in terms of accelerating all
these innovative techniques, and solutions, and services
that we're seeing these days.
>> Yeah, so I think it's really...
It's a fantastic confluence of factors that we've seen
in Postgres, or are seeing in Postgres today,
where Postgres has really, really matured
over the last couple of years,
where things like high availability, parallel processing,
use of very high core counts, et cetera, have come together
with the drive towards digital transformation,
the enormous amounts of data that businesses are dealing
with today, so,
and then the third factor's really the embracing of
opensource, right?
I mean, Linux has shown the way,
and has shown that this is really, really possible.
And now we're seeing Postgres as, I think,
the next big opensource innovation, after Linux,
achieving the same type of transformation.
So it's really, it's a maturing, it's an acceptance,
and the big drive towards dealing with a lot more data
as part of digital transformation.
>> You know, part of that acceptance that you talk about
is about kind of accepting the fact that you have
a legacy system that maybe,
if you're not going to completely overhaul,
you still have to integrate, right?
You've got to compliment and start this kind of migration.
So in your perspective, or from your perspective,
what kind of progress is Postgres allowing
in the mindset of CTOs among your client base, or whatever,
that their legacy systems can function
in this new environment, that all is not lost,
and while there is some, perhaps, catching up to do,
or some patching you have to do here and there,
that it's not as arduous, or not as complex,
as might appear to be on the face.
>> Well, I think there's,
the maturing of Postgres that has really
really opened this up, right?
Where we're seeing that Postgres
can handle these workloads, right?
And at the same time,
there's a growing number of success cases where companies
across all industries, financial services,
insurance, manufacturing, retail are using Postgres.
So, so you're no longer,
you're no longer the first leader who's taken
a higher risk, right?
Like, five or 10 years ago,
Postgres knowledge was not readily available.
So if you want Postgres, it was really hard
to find somebody who could support you, right?
Or find an employee that you could hire
who would be the Postgres expert.
That's no longer the case.
There's plenty of books about Postgres.
There's lots of conferences about Postgres.
It's a big meetup topic.
So, getting know how and getting acceptance amongst
your team to use Postgres has become a lot easier, right?
At the same time, over 90%
of all enterprises today use open source
in one way or the other.
Which basically means they have open source policies.
They have ways to bring open source
into the development stream.
So that makes it possible, right?
Whereas before it was really hard,
you had to have an individual who would evangelized to go,
get open source, et cetera,
now open source is something that almost everybody is using.
You know, from government to financing services,
open sources use all over the place, right?
So, so now you have something that really matured, right?
There's a lot of references out there
and then you have the policies that make it possible, right?
You have the success stories
and now all the pieces have come together to deal
with this onslaught of data, right?
And then maybe the last thing that
that really plays a big role is the cloud.
Postgres runs everywhere, right?
I mean, it runs from an Arduino to Amazon.
Everywhere.
And so, which basically means
if you want to drive agile business transformation,
you call Postgres because you don't have
to decide today where it's going to run.
You're not locking into a vendor.
You're not locking into a limited support system.
You can run this thing anywhere.
It'll run on your laptop.
It'll run on every cloud in the world.
You can have it managed, you can have it hosted.
You can add have every flavor you want
and there's lots of good Postgres support companies
out there.
So all of these factors together is really
what makes us so interesting, right?
>> Kubernetes and this marriage, this complimentary,
you know relationship right now with Kubernetes,
what has that done?
You think in terms of providing additional services
or at least providing perhaps a new approach
or new philosophies, new concepts
in terms of database management?
>> Well, it's maybe the most
the most surprising thing or surprising from the outside.
Probably not from the inside,
but you think that that Postgres this now 25 year old,
database twenty-five year old open source project
would be kind of like completely, you know,
incompatible with Kubernetes, with containers.
But what really happens is Postgres
in containers today is the number one database,
after Engine X.
It is the number two software
that is being deployed in containers.
So it's really become the workhorse
of the whole microservices transformation, right?
A 25 year old software, well, it has a very small footprint.
It has a lot of interesting features
like GIS, document processing, now graph capabilities,
common table expressions
all those things that are really like cool for developers.
And that's probably what leads it to be
the number one database in containers.
So it's absolutely compatible with Kubernetes.
And the whole transformation towards microservices is
is like, you know, there's nothing better out there.
It runs everywhere
and has the most innovative technologies in it.
And that's what we're seeing.
Also, you go
to the annual stack overflow survey of developers, right?
It's been consistently number one
or number two most loved and most used database, right?
So, so what's amazing is
that it's this relatively old technology that is, you know,
beating everybody else in this digital transformation
and then the adoption by developers.
>> Just like old dog new tricks, right?
It's still winning, right?
>> Yeah, yeah, and, and, you know, the elephant is
the symbol and this elephant does dance.
>> Still dancing that's right.
You know, and this is kind of a loaded question
but there are a lot of databases out there,
a lot of options, obviously from your perspective, you know,
Postgres is winning, right?
And, and, and from the size of the marketplace
it is certainly leading RA leader.
In your opinion, you know, what, what is this confluence
of factors that have influenced this, this market position
if you will, of Postgres or market acceptance of Postgres?
>> It's, I mean, it's the, it's a maturing of the core.
As I said before, that the transaction rates
et cetera, Postgres can handle, are growing every year
and are growing dramatic, right?
So that's one thing.
And then you have it, that Postgres is really,
I think, the most reliable and relational database out there
as what is my opinion, I'm biased, I guess.
And, and it's, it's super quality code
but then you add to that the innovation drive.
I mean, it was the first one out there
with good JSONB support, right?
And now it's brought in JSON Path as
as part of the new SQL standard.
So now you can address JSON data inside your database
and the same way you do it inside your browser.
And that's pretty cool for developers.
Then you combine that with PostGIS, right,
which is, I think the most advanced GIS system
out there in database.
Now, now you got relations, asset compliant,
GIS and document.
You may say what's so cool about that.
Well, what's cool about it is
I can do absolutely reliable asset compliant transactions.
I can have a fantastic personalization engine
through JSONB,
and then all my applications need to know
where is the transaction?
Where is the next store?
How far away I'm a form of the parking spot?
Right? So now I got a really
really nice recipe to put the applications
of the future together.
You add onto that movements toward supporting graph
and supporting other capabilities inside the database.
So now you got, you got capability,
you've got reliability and you got fantastic innovation.
I mean, there's nothing better out there.
>> Let's hit the security angle here,
'cause you talked about the asset test,
and certainly, you know, those, that criteria is being met.
No question about that, whether it's isolation, durability,
consistency, whatever, but, but security,
I don't have to tell you what a growing concern this is.
It's already paramount, but we're seeing every day
write stories about, about intrusions and
and invasions, if you will.
So in terms of providing that layer of security
that everybody's looking for right now, you know, this
this ultra impenetrable force, if you will,
what in your mind, what's Postgres allowing for,
in that respect in terms of security, peace of mind,
and maybe a little additional comfort
that everybody in your space is looking for these?
>> So, so look at, look at security
with a database like, like multiple layers, right?
There's not just, you don't do security only one place.
It's like when you go into a bank branch, right?
I mean, they do lock the door, they have a camera,
there is a gate in front of the safe, there's a safe door.
And inside the safe, there is still,
again safety deposit boxes with individual locks.
The same applies to Postgres, right?
Where let's say we start at the heart
of it where we can secure and protect tables and data.
We're using access control lists
and groups and usernames, et cetera.
Right? So that's, that's at the heart of it.
But then outside of that, we can encrypt the data when
on disk or when it's in transit on disk.
Most people use the Linux disc encryption systems
but there's also good partners out there, like
like more metric or others that we work with,
that that provide security on disk.
And then you go out from there
and then you have the securing of the database itself again
through the log-ins and the groups.
You go out from there and now you have the securing
of the hosts that the database is sitting on.
Then you'll look at securing the data on the networks
through SSL and certificates, et cetera.
So that basically there's
a multi-layer security model layer
that positions Postgres extremely well.
And then maybe the last thing is to say
it certainly integrates very well
with ELDAP, active directory, Kerberos,
all the usual suspects that you would use
to secure technology inside the enterprise
or in an open network,
like where people work from home, et cetera.
>> You talked about the history
about this 25 year old technology, you know, founded back
at Cal Berkeley, you know, probably almost some 30 years ago
and certainly has evolved.
And, and as you have pointed out now
as a very mature technology, what do you see though
in terms of growth from here?
Like, where does it go
from here in the next 18 months, 24 months, what
what do you think is that next barrier, that challenge that
that you think the technology
and this open source community wants to take on?
>> Well, I think there's
there's the continuous effort of making it faster, right?
That always happens, right?
Every database wants to be faster
do more transactions per second, et cetera.
And there's a lot of work that has been done there.
I mean, just in the last couple of years,
Postgres performance has increased by over 50%.
Right? So, so transactions per second
and that kind of scalability
that is going to continue to be, to be a focus, right?
And then the other one is leading the implementation
of the SQL standards, right?
So there'd be the most advanced database,
the most innovative database, because, remember
for many years now, Postgres has come
up with a new release on an annual basis.
Other database vendors are now catching up to that,
but Postgres has done that for years.
So innovation has always been at the heart of it.
So we started with JSONB,
Key value pair came even before that,
PostGis has been around for a long time,
graph extensions are going to be the next thing,
ingestion of time series data is going to, is going to happen.
So there's going to be an ongoing stream
of innovations happening.
But one thing that I can say is
because Postgres is a pure open source project.
There's not a hard roadmap, like where it's going to go
but where it's going to go is always driven
by what people want to have, right?
There is no product management department.
There's no, there's no great visionary that says,
"Oh, this is where we're going to go."
No, no.
What's going to happen is what people want to have, right?
If companies or contributors want to have a certain feature
because they need it, well, that's how it's going to happen.
And that's really been at the heart
of this since Mike Stonebraker,
who's an advisor to EDB today, invented it.
And then, you know, the open source project got created.
This has always been the movement to only focus
on things that people actually want to have
because if nobody wants to have it,
we're just not going to build it because nobody wants it.
Right? So when you asked me for the roadmap
I believe it's going to be, you know, faster,
obviously, always faster, right?
Everybody wants faster.
And then there's going to be innovation features
like making the document stored even better,
graph ingestion of large time series, et cetera.
That's really what I believe is going to drive it forward.
>> Wow. Yeah, the market has spoken and as you point out
the market will continue to speak and, and drive that bus.
So Mark, thank you for the time today.
We certainly appreciate that.
And wish EDB continued success at Postgres vision 2021.
And thanks for the time.
>> Thanks John, it was a pleasure.
>> You bet.
Mark Linster, joining us, the CTO at EDB.
I'm John Walls, you've been watching theCUBE.
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