Many of us have known how great Postgres was for years.

In fact I recall a conversation with some sales engineers about 6 years ago that previously worked for a large database vendor that really no one likes down in Redwood City. They were remarking how the biggest threat to them was Postgres. At first they were able to just brush it off saying it was open source and no real database could be open source. Then as they dug in they realized there was more there than most knew about and they would have to continually be finding ways to discredit it in sales conversations. Well it doesn’t look like those SEs or the rest of that company was too successful.

Postgres is certainly having it’s moment, and I personally don’t expect it to fade soon.

An equally interesting shift I’ve watched from the outside has been Microsoft’s shift to support and engage with the open source movement. Personally that shift is extremely exciting to see, especially today as they announce their general availability of their Postgres offering. And with their announcement it looks they’re not just dabbling but shipping a very compelling offering, notably high availability is built-in which means they’re very much targetting production workloads. With their GA release there are a number of interesting boxes checked:

• HIPPA, SOC, ISO compliances
• 99.99% uptime SLA
• Available in 22 regions

Personally I’m looking forward to the new competition for Postgres users as it’ll make Postgres better and better for all. When I was at Heroku and was running product for Heroku Postgres 7 years ago we were the only large major provider. Today that landscape looks a lot different and it just means more choice and more quality if you want to run Postgres. So welcome Microsoft, I look forward to giving Azure Postgres a try.