 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PostgreSQL Vision 2021 brought to you by EDB. Well, good day everybody, John Walls here on theCUBE and continuing our CUBE Conversation as part of PostgreSQL Vision 2021 sponsored by EDB with EDB's Chief Technology Officer, Mr. Mark Lindster. Mark, good morning to you, how are you doing today? I'm doing very fine, very good, so. Excellent, excellent, glad you could join us and we appreciate the time, a chance to look at what's going on in this world of data, which as you know, continues to evolve quite rapidly. So let's just take that 30,000 foot perspective here to begin with here and let's talk about data and management and what Postgres is doing in terms of accelerating all these innovative techniques and solutions and services that we're seeing these days. Yeah, so I think it's really, you know, it's a, it's a fantastic, it's a fantastic confluence of factors that we've seen in Postgres or are seeing in Postgres today where, you know, Postgres has really, really matured over the last couple of years where things like high availability, parallel processing, use of very high core counts, et cetera have come together with the drive towards digital transformation, the enormous amounts of data that businesses are dealing with today. So, and then the third factor is really the embracing of open source, right? I mean, Linux has shown the way and has shown that this is really, really possible and now we're seeing Postgres as I think the next big open source innovation after Linux achieving the same type of transformation. So it's really, it's a maturing, it's an acceptance and a big drive towards dealing with a lot more data as part of digital transformation. You know, part of that acceptance that you talk about is about it, kind of accepting the fact that you have a legacy system that maybe if you're not going to completely overhaul you still have to integrate, right? You've got to compliment and start this kind of migration. So in your perspective or from your perspective what kind of progress is Postgres allowing in the mindset of CTOs, you know, among your client base, whatever, that their legacy systems can function in this new environment that's always not lost. And while there is some perhaps catching up to do or some patching you have to do here and there that it's not as arduous or not as complex as might appear to be on the face. Well, I think there's the maturing of Postgres that has really, really opened this up, right? Where we're seeing that Postgres can handle these workloads, right? And at the same time, there's a growing, there's a growing number of success cases where companies across all industries, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, retail are using Postgres. So you're no longer, you're no longer the first leader who's taken a higher risk, right? Like five or 10 years ago, Postgres knowledge was not readily available. So if you went Postgres, it was really hard to find somebody who could support you, right? Or find an employee that you could hire who would be the Postgres expert. That's no longer the case. There's plenty of books about Postgres. There's lots of conferences about Postgres. It's a big meetup topic. So getting know-how and getting acceptance amongst your team to use Postgres has become a lot easier, right? At the same time, over 90% of all enterprises today use open source in one way or the other, which basically means they have open source policies, they have ways to bring open source into the development stream. So that makes it possible, right? Whereas before it was really hard, you had to have an individual who would be evangelized to go get open source, et cetera. Now open source is something that almost everybody is using, from government to financial services, open source is used all over the place, right? So now you have something that really matured, right? There's a lot of references out there. And then you have the policies that make it possible, right? You have the success stories and now all the pieces have come together to deal with this onslaught of data, right? And then maybe the last thing that really plays a big role is the cloud. Postgres runs everywhere, right? I mean, it runs from an Arduino to Amazon, everywhere. And so which basically means if you want to drive agile business transformation, you go Postgres because you don't have to decide today where it's gonna run. You're not locking into a vendor. You're not locking into a limited support system. You can run this thing anywhere. It'll run on your laptop. It'll run on every cloud in the world. You can have it managed. You can have it posted, you can have every flavor you want. And there's lots of good Postgres support companies out there. So all of these factors together is really what makes us so interesting, right? What the Kubernetes and this marriage, this complimentary relationship right now with Kubernetes, what has that done, you think, in terms of providing additional services or at least providing perhaps a new approach or new philosophies, new concepts in terms of database management? Well, it's maybe the most surprising thing or surprising from the outside, probably not surprising from the inside. But you'd think that Postgres, this now 25 year old database, 25 year old open source project would be kind of like completely incompatible with Kubernetes, with containers. But what really happens is Postgres in containers today is the number one database after Nginx. It is the number two software that is being deployed in containers. So it's really become the workhorse of the whole microservices transformation, right? A 25 year old software, well, it has a very small footprint. It has a lot of interesting features like GIS, document processing, now graph capabilities, common table expressions, all those things that are really like cool for developers. And that's probably what leads it to be the number one database in containers. So it's absolutely compatible with Kubernetes and the whole transformation towards microservices is like, you know, there's nothing better out there. It runs everywhere. It has the most innovative technologies in it. And that's what we're seeing. But also you go to the annual Stack Overflow Survey of developers, right? It's been consistently number one or number two most loved and most used database, right? So what's amazing is that it's this relatively old technology that is, you know, beating everybody else in this digital transformation and in the adoption by developers. It's like old dog new tricks, right? It's still winning, right? Yeah, yeah. And you know, the elephant is the symbol and this elephant does dance. Still dancing, that's right. And this is kind of a loaded question but there's just a lot of databases out there, a lot of options. Obviously from your perspective, you know, Postgres is winning, right? And from the signs of the marketplace, it is certainly leading LRA leader. In your opinion, you know, what is this confluence of factors that have influenced this market position, if you will, of Postgres or market acceptance of Postgres? It's, I mean, it's the maturing of the core. As I said before, the transaction rates, et cetera, the postman's can handle a grown every year and a grown dramatic, right? So that's one thing. And then you have it that Postgres is really, I think the most reliable and relational database out there. That's at least my opinion, I'm biased, I guess. And it's a super quality code. But then you add to that the innovation drive. I mean, it was the first one out there with good JSON v support, right? And now it's brought in JSON path as part of the new SQL standard. So now you can address JSON data inside your database in the same way you do it inside your browser. And that's pretty cool for developers. Then you combine that with PostGIS, right? Which is, I think, the most advanced GIS system out there in databases. Now you got relations, asset compliant, GIS and document. You may say, what's so cool about that? Well, what's so cool about it is, I can do absolutely reliable asset compliant transactions. I can have a fantastic personalization engine through JSON v and then all my applications need to know where is the transaction? Where is the next store? How far away am I from the parking spot, right? So now I got a really, really nice recipe to put the applications of the future together. You add on to that movements towards supporting graph and supporting other capabilities inside the database. So now you got capability, you got reliability, and you got fantastic innovation. I mean, there's nothing better out there. Let's hit the security angle here because you talked about the asset test and certainly that criteria is being met, no question about that, whether it's isolation, durability, consistency, whatever. But security, I don't have to tell you what a growing concern this is. It's already paramount, but we're seeing every day, right? Stories about intrusions and invasions, if you will. So in terms of providing that layer of security that everybody's looking for right now, this ultra impenetrable force, if you will, what in your mind, what's Prosgres allowing for in that respect in terms of security, peace of mind, and maybe a little additional comfort that everybody in your space is looking for these days? No, so look at security with a database like multiple layers, right? There's not just you don't do security only in one place. It's like when you go into a bank branch, right? I mean, they do lock the door, they have a camera, there is a gate in front of the safe. There is a safe door and inside the safe, there is still again safety deposit boxes with individual locks. The same applies to Prosgres, right? Where let's say we start at the heart of it where we can secure and protect tables and data, right? We're using access control lists and groups and user names, et cetera, right? So that's at the heart of it. But then outside of that, we can encrypt the data when it's on disk or when it's in transit. On disk, most people use the Linux disk encryption systems but there's also good partners out there like Vortmetric or others that we work with that provide security on disk. And then you go out from there and then you have the securing of the database itself again through the logins and the groups. You go out from there and now you have the securing of the host that the database is sitting on. Then you'll look at securing the data on the networks through SSL and certificates, et cetera. So that basically there's a multi-layer security model there that positions Prosgres extremely well. And then maybe the last thing is to say it certainly integrates very well with LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos, all the usual suspects that you would use to secure technology inside the enterprise or in an open network like where people work from home, et cetera. You talked about the history about this 25-year-old technology founded back at Cal Berkeley probably almost some 30 years ago and certainly has evolved. And as you have pointed out now as a very mature technology, what do you see though in terms of growth from here? Like where does it go from here in the next 18 months, 24 months? What do you think is that next barrier or that challenge that you think the technology in this open source community wants to take on? Well, I think there's the continuous effort of making it faster, right? That always happens, right? Every database wants to be faster, do more transactions per second, et cetera. And there's a lot of work that has been done there. I mean, just in the last couple of years Postgres performance has increased by over 50%, right? So transactions per second and that kind of scalability that is going to continue to be a focus, right? And then the other one is leading the implementation of the SQL standards, right? So there'd be the most advanced database of the most innovative database because remember for many years now Postgres has come up with a new release on an annual basis. Other database vendors are now catching up to that but Postgres has done that for years. So innovation has always been at the heart of it. So we started with JSON Bay, key value pair came even before that. PostJS has been around for a long time. Graph extensions are going to be the next thing. Ingestion of time series data is going to happen. So there's going to be an ongoing stream of innovations happening. But one thing that I can say is because Postgres is a pure open source project there's not a hard roadmap like where it's going to go is always driven by what people want to have, right? There's no product management department. There's no great visionary says, oh, this is where we're going to go. No, no, what's going to happen is what people want to have, right? If companies or contributors want to have a certain feature because they need it, well, that's how it's going to happen. And that's really been at the heart of this since Mike Stonebreaker, who's an advisor to EDB today invented it and then the open source project got created. This has always been the movement to only focus on things that people actually want to have because if nobody wants to have it, we're just not going to build it because nobody wants it, right? So when you asked me for the roadmap, I believe it's going to be faster, obviously always faster, right? Everybody wants faster. And then there's going to be innovation features like making the document story even better, graph ingestion of large time series, et cetera. That's really what's, but I believe is going to drive it forward. Well, yeah, the market has spoken. And as you point out, the market will continue to speak and drive that bus. So Mark, thank you for the time today. We certainly appreciate that and wish EDB continued success of Postgres Vision 2021. And thanks for the time. Thanks, John, it was a pleasure. You bet. Mark Lester joining us as CTO at EDB. I'm John Walls. You've been watching theCUBE.