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Timescale, the company behind the leading relational database for time-series, TimescaleDB, created and distributed the State of PostgreSQL 2022 survey. The survey ran for four weeks, between June 6, 2022, and June 30, 2022.
Mirroring the 2019 and 2021 survey results, respondents from EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) account for roughly half of all respondents, followed by North America at 25.9%.
According to DB engines, PostgreSQL is getting more and more popular. It comes as no surprise that the number of new PostgreSQL users experimenting with the database for less than a year has grown from 6.1% in 2021 to 6.4% in 2022.
We introduced more options in this year´s survey, including open source, which ranked as the #1 reason people choose PostgreSQL (19.3%), followed by reliability (16.5%) and extensions (9.9%).
Interestingly, the reason why people choose PostgreSQL changes as the experience grows. Open source is the most important factor for choosing PostgreSQL for those who started using PostgreSQL in the past 5 years.
Reliability and open source are important for those using PostgreSQL for 6-10 years. People using PostgreSQL between 11-15 years choose PostgreSQL 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, users across the board have contributed to the PostgreSQL community.
A few respondents shed light on what they like the most about the PostgreSQL community and where they see room for improvement to make it more welcoming for newcomers in the freeform bonus questions:
Moving patch submissions off of mailing lists onto some sort of code forge.
It's a pretty ubiquitous system so the community is vast.
55% of respondents said that PostgreSQL is being used more or a lot more today than it was used one year ago. Small and medium businesses (0-50 employees) use PostgreSQL more today than they did one year ago.
Regardless of the company's size, respondents reported usually working in a team of 2 to 10 people.
Over ¾ of respondents report using PostgreSQL for personal projects. 95% of all respondents use PostgreSQL at work.
74% of respondents use PostgreSQL for both personal and professional projects.
The top 5 personal use cases closely mirror the professional use cases, except PostgreSQL company replaces DevOps.
2022 top 5 results slightly differ from 2021. App development and dashboarding defended their spot in the top 5 of personal and professional use cases. IoT applications and finance use cases pushed out monitoring and "other" use cases from the personal use cases.
PostgreSQL company, finance, and IoT applications replaced monitoring, real-time analytics, and DevOps in the top 5 professional use cases.
Majority of respondents (76.2%) said that technical documentation is their preferred way of learning about PostgreSQL, followed by long-form blog posts (51.5%) and short-form blog posts (43.3%).
Respondents with less than 5 years of PostgreSQL experience prefer video over long-form and short-form blog posts.
Note: Respondents could choose as many options as desired.
TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION
LONG-FORM BLOG POSTS
SHORT-FORM BLOG POSTS
While some respondents reference difficulties using the PostgreSQL mailing lists as the primary way of interfacing with the core team and project overall, more than 20% of all respondents mentioned the mailing lists as one of the ways they keep engaged with the community. Other notable areas that people engage in include Slack (10%), Stack Overflow (8%), Blogs (8%), Twitter (6%), and Reddit (6%).
A few respondents shed light on what they like the most about the PostgreSQL community and where they see room for improvement to make it more welcoming for newcomers in the freeform bonus questions:
The openness and very welcoming attitude to all in the community by most in the community.
Slack or Discord instead of mailing lists. Email is your grandfather's technology. Kids these days avoid it like the plague.
The community needs to be much more diverse.
In this free-form question, respondents shared their favorite PostgreSQL extensions. The 2022 top 7 responses mirror 2021 responses except for citus pushing out pg_repack from the top 7.
Consistent with the 2021 survey, SQL, Python, Java, shell scripts, and JavaScript/TypeScript were cited 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 than less experienced users.
69% of respondents said they use psql to connect to the PostgreSQL database. Other top answers include pgAdmin, DBeaver, Datagrip, and IntelliJ.
Almost half of the respondents (47.8%) said they do not use other third-party tools - but of those who do, use one, Depesz EXPLAIN and pgBouncer were the most common response.
While 21% of respondents do not use visualization tools, of those who do, Grafana, pgAdmin, and DBeaver are the tools they most likely use. These results are consistent with 2021 responses.
Compared to 2019 and 2021, fewer respondents reported self-managing the PostgreSQL database. It appears that PostgreSQL users are increasingly using DBaaS providers for deploying PostgreSQL.
Of those who deploy PostgreSQL as a Kubernetes container, 44% use Helm, 16% use Crunchy Operator, and 7% use Zalando Operator.
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