The emergence of Postgres as a defacto normal for brand new growth initiatives has shocked many IT observers. However one group that’s not shocked are the oldsters at Crunchy Information, a South Carolina firm that’s been constructing a Postgres internet hosting enterprise for transactional workloads for greater than a decade. And with its current product growth, Crunchy Information is trying to take Postgres into analytics, too.
When Crunchy Information was based again in 2012, Postgres didn’t register a lot of a blip on the information administration radar. In case you learn the main tech publications again then, you’ll recall a large amount of ink was spent on new open supply initiatives for giant knowledge, issues like Apache Hadoop and NoSQL databases like MongoDB.
Nevertheless, when the would-be Crunchy Information co-founders had in-depth conversations with tech leaders at massive corporations, they discovered one thing that shocked them: rising demand for Postgres providers, says Paul Laurence, the president and co-founder of Crunchy Information.
“They have been completely utilizing Hadoop and MongoDB. However the place they felt the necessity most was round Postgres,” Laurence tells Datanami. “They have been betting on a brand new open-source knowledge administration toolbox, the place that they had these NoSQL databases. That was a part of the place they have been going. However additionally they noticed this as a possibility to shift in direction of open supply on the relational and SQL aspect. And so they had evaluated the panorama and chosen Postgres as sort of their large guess.”
Whereas it’s mainstream now, the entire business open-source enterprise mannequin was nonetheless comparatively new. Other than maybe Crimson Hat, no different corporations had succeeded with it, as much as that time. Cloudera emerged because the main contender to corral the varied cattle (Pig, Hive, and so on.) within the Hadoop world, whereas MongoDB made inroads with Net and cell app builders to outline the nascent NoSQL market. The truth that Crunchy Information would put its business open supply chips on a non-distributed relational database that was already 26-year-old–virtually historical by IT requirements–stood out like stale milqetoast.
“Postgres was largely dismissed after we first began. It was actually all about Hadoop and MongoDB,” stated Laurence, who co-founded Crunch Information along with his father, Bob Laurence. “It was very contrarian on the time…Folks would say ‘You guys are loopy. What are you guys doing beginning a SQL database firm? SQL is lifeless. That’s not an actual factor anymore.’”
Because it turned out, SQL was removed from lifeless. Inside just some years, all the main NoSQL databases can be including SQL interfaces to their databases, and rebranding the “No” in NoSQL to imply “not solely.” The race so as to add SQL engines to Hadoop was equally pushed by a need to match the shiny new computing framework to the large mass of skillsets and toolsets that already existed.
Getting Crunchy with IT
However Crunchy Information wasn’t nearly sustaining the relational knowledge mannequin and the SQL language. It was about Postgres, that open supply database created by Mike Stonebreaker again in 1986. When enterprise CIOs and CTOs surveyed the market, they noticed different relational databases, to make sure. The Oracle database, in any case, remains to be the primary on the DB-Engines rating. However within the knowledge administration Venn diagram, there was one database on the intersection of “open supply” and “relational” and “not Oracle,” and its identify was Postgres.
“Suffice it to say,” Laurence says, “from that time ahead, the momentum behind Postgres has simply continued to develop.”
Crunchy Information’s first providing, Crunchy Postgres, mirrored Crimson Hat’s enterprise Linux providing: a trusted distribution of Postgres. Massive firms and governmental businesses that had settled on Postgres as their database normal adopted this product, and managed the database themselves.
When containers turned the popular methodology for operating virtualized IT providers, Crunchy Information developed its personal Kubernetes operator, and offered it together with its distribution of open supply Postgres as Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes.
Because the cloud enterprise mannequin took off in 2020, Crunchy Information responded by delivering a hosted model of its Postgres distribution. Clients responded positively to this providing, known as Crunchy Bridge, which was the primary hosted Postgres providing from a pure-play database firm.
Earlier this 12 months, Crunchy Information delved into the analytics aspect of the home for the primary time with the launch of Crunchy Bridge for Analytics.
Crunchy Bridge for Analytics doesn’t flip Postgres right into a full MPP- type database, a la Inexperienced Plum or Redshift. That will require making modifications to Postgres and creating a brand new fork, with is one thing that Crunchy Information is loath to do.
Postgres for Analytics
As an alternative, the Crunchy Bridge for Analytics providing serves as a question engine that runs atop Parquet knowledge that clients have saved of their Amazon S3 buckets, thereby eliminating the necessity for advanced ETL knowledge pipelines. It additionally brings a vectorized execution engine to hurry up response occasions for conventional analytics and OLAP workloads.
Postgres has emerged as the highest open supply relational database (Tee11/Shutterstock)
Earlier this month, the corporate took the following step and introduced assist for Apache Iceberg in Crunchy Bridge for Analytics. This allows clients to leverage their funding in Postgres to supply lakehouse-style analytics utilizing the favored open supply desk format.
The choice to construct a Postgres service for analytics makes as a lot sense because it does for transactional workloads, says Craig Kerstiens, the chief product officer for Crunchy Information.
“Why Postgres? As a result of there’s an enormous ecosystem of all the pieces that sits on high,” Kerstiens says. “Whether or not it’s geospatial with PostGIS or vector search with pgvector, or full textual content search. Trying on the ecosystem of instruments on high, whether or not it’s Energy BI or Metabase…It’ s an enormous, huge ecosystem of all types of tooling that sits on high and is aware of find out how to work with it.”
Crunchy Information’s analytics providing isn’t open supply, nevertheless it strictly adhere to Postgres requirements by functioning as a Postgres plug-in, or extension, Kerstiens says.
“We don’t lag behind on Postgres. We’re not going to be frozen on a model from 10 years in the past. We’re in a position to keep present,” he says. “It’s mainly an embedded analytics question engine that simply works. You don’t have to consider it. You don’t need to know the way it works. To you, it nonetheless seems to be similar to Postgres.”
Clients Demand Postgres
Postgres adoption reveals no signal of slowing down, and that’s excellent news for Crunchy Information, which, regardless of adopting a “West Coast crunchy enterprise mannequin,” is definitely primarily based in Charleston, South Carolina. Now in its thirteenth 12 months, Crunchy Information has grown to greater than 100 workers and 500 clients, with extra undoubtedly on the best way.
That success typically results in attention-grabbing questions, says Kerstiens, who helped to scale one of many first hosted Postgres choices as a Heroku developer.
Crunchy Information President and co-founder Paul Laurence
“Each week, I’ve somebody say ‘Are you able to run Mongo for me? Are you able to run Redis?’ No, we’re centered on Postgres,” Kerstiens says. “However that sort of buyer love and superb Postgres expertise is actually the place we focus foundationally.”
Whereas the remainder of the information administration world zigged with Hadoop and NoSQL, Crunchy Information zagged with scale-up, relational tech. It could have seemed like a gutsy guess on the time, however the Laurence’s had what turned out to be an ace card hidden up their sleeve: a willingness to hearken to buyer enter.
“We began as a result of we had some good clients and a few of us who have been betting on Postgres,” Laurence says. “On the time, we had a really unhealthy web site and we’re getting inbound emails and calls from Fortune 50 corporations saying, ‘This seems to be like precisely what we want. We’re investing in Postgres as we go ahead and we want somebody to come back in and assist us perceive how we do this and enterprise setting.’
“It’s continued to shock and impress even us after we made that guess initially. It’s adoption has actually been spectacular,” Laurence continues. “Postgres is all we do. We’ve been a Postgres firm from the start, supporting group of all dimension achieve success with Postgres. There’s no scarcity of information choices on the market. In case you’re working with us, it’s as a result of you’ve got a Postgres-centric view.”
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