Why PostgreSQL Is Overtaking MySQL: Trends, Cloud Adoption, and Developer Preferences

21CTO editorial: This article reviews statistics from various sources indicating that PostgreSQL is becoming noticeably popular and is overtaking other relational databases such as MySQL.

Database System Rankings Over the Past 10 Years

Looking at the past decade of database engines, PostgreSQL is clearly on the rise while MySQL shows signs of stagnation and even a slight decline in ranking.

PostgreSQL is increasingly favored by both startups and large enterprises.

PostgreSQL Ranks Highly in the 2023 StackOverflow Survey

PostgreSQL is now one of the most commonly used databases among professional developers and programming beginners, indicating growing popularity among new developers who will shape the future of their companies.

Cloud Providers Are Prioritizing PostgreSQL

Major cloud vendors such as Google have introduced fully managed PostgreSQL‑compatible services like AlloyDB, reflecting a trend toward building custom database offerings based on PostgreSQL.

AlloyDB Migration Tailored Specifically for PostgreSQL

AWS and other cloud providers are also guiding customers to migrate to PostgreSQL.

AWS recently released Babelfish, a middleware that translates SQL Server queries to PostgreSQL, allowing companies with SQL Server workloads to move to Aurora PostgreSQL without changing their queries, stored procedures, or application code.

Custom Databases Built on PostgreSQL

Specialized databases such as time‑series databases are built on PostgreSQL, demonstrating its reliable engine that can serve as a foundation for other technologies and offering additional advantages for customized solutions.

Timescale’s 2022 PostgreSQL data summary is shown below.

PostgreSQL originated in the 1980s as an improvement over the Ingres database engine; it is cross‑platform, free, and open source.

Survey data shows that PostgreSQL’s popularity is increasing, with the proportion of users who have been using the database for less than a year rising from 6.1 % in 2021 to 6.4 % in 2022.

Open source, reliability, and extensibility are the main reasons users chose PostgreSQL in 2022

Interestingly, users’ years of experience correlate with their reasons: those with 11‑15 years of experience prioritize reliability, while users with less than five years cite open source as the primary factor.

PostgreSQL Users Are Growing

Small and medium‑size enterprises (0‑50 employees) report higher usage of PostgreSQL compared with a year ago, and 55 % of respondents say they have increased their database usage.

PostgreSQL Documentation Quality Is High

76.1 % of respondents say technical documentation is their preferred way to learn PostgreSQL, followed by articles (51.5 %) and short blogs (43.3 %). However, newer users (less than five years) tend to prefer video tutorials as their first learning resource.