Timescale recently released a 2022 State of PostgreSQL survey report. The survey ran from June 6 to June 30, 2022, and received responses from 992 developers around the world. The State of PostgreSQL Survey provides some key insights into PostgreSQL capabilities and the wider PostgreSQL community.
The first edition of the report, released in 2019, gathered feedback from more than 500 developers, and the second edition in 2021 also sampled nearly 500 participants. Respondents from EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) accounted for about half of all respondents, followed by North America at 25.9%, according to the two-year survey results.
In addition to sending the survey to past participants, Timescale has promoted it on social media, email newsletters (their own and 3rd parties), TimescaleDB and PostgreSQL Slack channels, PostgreSQL mailing list, Reddit, and Hacker News. Compared with the previous two times, the number of people participating in the survey has increased this year. Key findings from the report include: why respondents use PostgreSQL, how they contribute to the community, adoption across organizations, and favorite tools and extensions.
"By organizing and publishing PostgreSQL status reports, we help developers and developer-focused companies and communities better understand what's going on with Postgres: the different types of Postgres users, the types of use cases they're working on, the A place to share and learn, how this has all changed, and opportunities for improvement for the entire Postgres community, which also gives us an opportunity to give back to the wider PostgreSQL community that we're proud to be a part of and have been very helpful to us ."
Some highlights from the report include:
1) The DB engines data points out that PostgreSQL is becoming more and more popular. The number of new PostgreSQL users who have tried the database for less than a year has grown from 6.1% in 2021 to 6.4% in 2022.
2) Open source is the number one reason for the public to choose PostgreSQL (19.3%), followed by reliability (16.5%) and extension (9.9%). The report notes that reasons for choosing PostgreSQL vary with experience. For those who have used PostgreSQL for less than 5 years, open source is the most important factor in their choice of PostgreSQL; for those who have used PostgreSQL for 6-10 years, reliability and open source are both important; 15 years of people choose PostgreSQL mainly because of its reliability.
3) 44% of PostgreSQL users with 15+ years of experience have contributed to PostgreSQL at least once. "In fact, all users contribute to the PostgreSQL community, regardless of their experience."
4) 55% of respondents said that PostgreSQL is used more today than it was a year ago.
5) Over 3/4 of respondents said they use PostgreSQL for personal projects, 95% use PostgreSQL at work, and 74% use PostgreSQL for personal and professional projects.
6) The majority of respondents (76.2%) indicated that technical documentation was their preferred way to learn PostgreSQL, followed by long blog posts (51.5%) and short blog posts (43.3%). Respondents with less than 5 years of PostgreSQL experience preferred videos to blog posts.
7) In terms of community interaction, although some respondents mentioned the difficulty of using the PostgreSQL mailing list as the main way to interact with the core team and the whole project, more than 20% of the respondents said that the mailing list is the way for them to keep in touch with the community one of the ways. Some other channels of engagement include Slack (10%), Stack Overflow (8%), blogs (8%), Twitter (6%) and Reddit (6%).
8) Respondents also shared some of their favorite PostgreSQL extensions. The top rankings are:
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PostGIS
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TimescaleDB
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pg_stat_statements
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pgcrypto
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pg_trgm
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Citus
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uuid-ossp
9) SQL, Python, Java, shell scripting and JavaScript/TypeScript are listed 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 scripting to access the database.
10) Among respondents who use tools to connect to PostgreSQL for query and administrative tasks, psql (69.4%), pgAdmin (35.3%) and DBeaver (26.2%) are the top three choices.
11) Grafana, pgAdmin and DBeaver are the most likely visualization tools.
12) Fewer respondents than in 2019 and 2021 said they would manage their own PostgreSQL database. It seems that PostgreSQL users are increasingly using DBaaS providers to deploy PostgreSQL. Of those deploying PostgreSQL as a Kubernetes container, 44% use Helm, 16% use the Crunchy Operator, and 7% use the Zalando Operator.
