2025-06-17 –, Frannz Salon
Postgres continues to be widely used, and Postgres-derived closed source databases such as AlloyDB and AWS Aurora and have gained popularity in recent years. In this talk, you’ll learn about the architecture of these radically different kinds of systems, what each of these companies means when they say “Postgres-comptatible” and how to choose one!
Who this is for:
This talk is ideally suited for engineers looking to either migrate an existing database to something new, or those wanting an overview of the Postgres-derived database landscape.
Relevance:
Nearly all the major cloud computing providers provide some sort of “Postgres-compatible” relational database service, but the choice isn’t as simple as picking whichever one your cloud provider offers. Some provide deep integration for AI/ML workloads, and others are serverless databases that aren’t Postgres-related at all. Combined with low awareness of more recent additions to open source Postgres’ feature set, many developers aren’t sure how to proceed in the Postgres in a way that best reflects their needs.
Talk outline:
- Intro: What makes Postgres Postgres-y? How has the open source community dealt with forks, rewrites and extensions over time, and how is that relevant to our discussion of ‘modern’ Postgres-derived databases?
- The meat: comparing and contrasting various Postgres-derived databases, understanding their feature sets, what makes them unique and what use cases they’re particularly well suited for
- Google’s AlloyDB Omni, AI/ML capabilities and columnar engines
- Amazon Aurora and Neon, both serverless Postgres-compatible databases, and what we mean by "Postgres compatible'
- TimescaleDB, PostGIS and other specialized extensions of Postgres, and why open source is cool and allows for infinite extensibility
- And of course open source Postgres, and what makes its most recent features relevant in 2025
Conclusion:
How the open source nature of Postgres has led to its continued evolution and relevancy in the data landscape, allowing it to evolve to meet new use cases like realtime data analytics and AI/ML.
What the audience will learn:
The feature sets of a variety of Postgres alternatives, what features are best suited for certain use cases, how some of those features (for instance, AlloyDB’s columnar engine) stack up against databases dedicated to those features (for instance, vs. ClickHouse for columnar data), and how open source project licensing affects the creation of all these new alternatives.
Search, Store, Scale
Level:Intermediate
Celeste is a Developer Educator at Aiven, a managed database services company heavily invested in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. She has been involved in open source software as a technical writer and contributor for the Kubernetes project since 2020, and has had her work on inclusive language in tech featured in the New York Times.