EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the Future

We have news! EdgeDB is rebranding as Gel, more on that below.

Let's talk about something else first.

Something fascinating has been happening recently. PostgreSQL seems to be quietly eating the database world. It's not just topping the charts, its adoption momentum is accelerating. What's going on? The answer is right there in the PostgreSQL.org's tagline:

It's not just an empty marketing boast. It's meaningful. Let's unpack, starting with what I think is the most important and consequential bit: Open Source.

Regardless of source availability, most database systems on the market today (including MySQL) are developed by a commercial entity. Postgres is different. It got bootstrapped at Berkeley as a research project and released under a very liberal MIT-like license. A decently-sized user base formed and after the university stopped making new releases, the project (newly-renamed as PostgreSQL) was picked up by a group of motivated hackers and that's how Postgres as we know it still gets developed and released today.

Arguably, this makes PostgreSQL the only mainsteam database system that is truly open-source. It can't be bought or license-rug-pulled and this creates a kind of trust that can't be emulated in any other way.

Now let's talk about the Advanced bit.

When the POSTGRES project was begun at Berkeley in 1985, extensibility and modularity were made the cornerstones of its design. This is possibly one of the main factors that made PostgreSQL successful. Custom data types, index types and operators were there since the inception.

PostgreSQL is a relational database at it's core, but with the ability to store (and index) JSON, spatial data, time series, vectors, it's arguably multimodal. Postgres might not be the best tool in any given use case, but it's good enough. Being able to run just one DBMS instead of 10 and do all the things you want to do is great! (Which is why, I think, most vector database startups are probably not going to make it in the long run.)

Also, building Postgres extensions is fun and nowadays you can even do it in Rust.

When it comes to actually running queries, PostgreSQL's query planner/optimizer is decidedly state-of-the-art. Given how much more compressed and expressive EdgeQL (Gel's query language) is compared to SQL, it's quite easy to write queries that translate to hundreds of kilobytes of SQL and Postgres usually chews through that without breaking a sweat.

PostgreSQL is the cleanest and most documented C project of this scale, and the sheer quality of the codebase is what gives Postgres all of the powers mentioned above while also keeping it extremely stable and secure.

So, yes, Postgres is the world's most advanced open source relational database (sorry, Sam!). What's even more fascinating is that Postgres seems to have been elevated to a sort of a de-facto standard. Have you noticed how almost every recent database startup claims or strives for PostgreSQL wire-protocol and SQL dialect compatibility? CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, TiDB, and even Google Spanner all either speak PostgreSQL exclusively or as an option. Oh, and you don't even need to build a whole new database from scratch to achieve compute and storage elasticity, just replace Postgres' storage layer like AWS Aurora or Neon did and you're good!