• Open-source is driving innovation, easier legal terms, better pricing and your choice of cloud with enterprise readiness
  • Re-platforming for the cloud drives a new database decision
  • Platform choice, innovation and lowest cost are driving Postgres to be ‘THE database’

The original ‘shadow IT was not from the cloud’, it was from departments or lines-of-business finding ways to provision cheap SQLServer environments for ‘data marts’.  These environments did not perform well, caused multiple servers to be created to make up for the substandard performance and resulted in a new level of technical debt.  Over time, these ‘shadow SQLServers’ became a necessary component of the business.  Add this to the 1000s of other SQLServers that came online inside IT – and we have a mess of technical and data debt.

Organizations in the above situation have 3 options:

  1. Stay on-premise and let the chaos continue. This includes the need to upgrade everyone – from servers to storage and SQLServer itself (as v2012 goes end of life this year, 2022).
  2. Microsoft is driving clients to move these workloads to Azure en masse. This ‘lift-and-shift’ is moving the mess to a subscription model with the only winner being Microsoft.
  3. Re-platform for the cloud. Rearchitect for the future.  The future of the cloud is open-source driven with a nimble tool stack that allows the inheritance of innovation.  It also means the data inside all these servers need to be cleaned up to know what to keep active, what to archive and what should be deleted.

Why Postgres is the way forward

In the world of cloud and open source there is only one database option – Postgres. Postgres is the result of work at the University of California Berkley by Dr Mike Stonebraker in the 1990s. It originated as open source and has evolved to become the defacto standard in cloud databases. If we consider DB Engines and their ranking process SQLServer is currently #3 and Postgres #4. If the slopes of their trending are projected out, we will expect Postgres to be more popular by spring 2024.

Microsoft has made it challenging for organizations to use anything but their Azure cloud for SQLServer workloads.  You pay more in AWS and GCP from a licensing perspective.

What to do

Take pause and consider the current landscape of SQLServers in your enterprise.  Microsoft made it easy to provision in the past and they exist everywhere.  Within those environments an inventory of the data needs to take place to decide what is real versus old, what is important versus noise and what should be kept, archived, or deleted.  Every terabyte of cloud storage costs money so be thoughtful and remove the debt.

Platform 3 Solutions has methodologies and tools to bring immediate answers to these questions and engineer a way forward.  With our partnership with EDB – the largest providers of Postgres in the world – we bring a cross-cloud offering to help clients make the best platform decisions.

Contact us or email us directly for help with your SQL Server to PostgreSQL migration today.

Let’s talk about how Platform 3 Solutions can work for you