EnterpriseDB was founded 20 years ago, and our commitment to Postgres has remained unwavering for the past two decades. We started EDB because we wanted to offer enterprise-grade Postgres as an alternative to Oracle. We knew companies were getting tired of paying exorbitant database licensing fees, and that open source could provide better database solutions at a fraction of the cost. Postgres was, and still is, the foundation we base all of EDB's offerings on. Many of the employees and founders of EDB who recognized the enormous potential of open source PostgreSQL are still with us today.
From the beginning, our focus was on improving Postgres, delivering superior service, and developing features to simplify migrations. While we grew our expertise internally, we worked to grow Postgres adoption across enterprise environments.
Early employees include Nikhil Sontakke, Ashish Mehra, Ashesh Vashi, and Pavan Deolasee.
EDB’s incredible history with Postgres
Here at EDB, we are busy building Postgres to support the AI workloads of the future, so we don't often have the chance to take a walk down memory lane and celebrate all that we have accomplished in the world of Postgres. The perfect opportunity to explore our rich history presented itself earlier this year, as more than 500 Postgres engineers, developers, and industry leaders gathered in Bangalore for PGConf India 2025. EDB attends open source conferences and meetups all around the world because they offer an incredible chance to share Postgres knowledge and experience and discuss the future of developers' favorite database. EDB was proud to be a diamond sponsor of Asia’s biggest PostgreSQL conference.
Tom Kincaid, Senior Vice President of Engineering for Database Server Products at EDB, took the stage at PGConf India to deliver the keynote address, highlighting EDB’s past, present, and future role in the Postgres open source community.
Here are some of the key takeaways from Tom's keynote at PGConf India 2025:
Investing in Postgres—then and now
The visionaries who work for EDB helped make Postgres what it is today. We have team members all over the world, including 300 in India.
We’ve championed PostgreSQL growth for over two decades and have sponsored most major Postgres conferences at the very highest level. We also continually invest in expanding Postgres capabilities through tools like installers, pgAdmin, Barman, repmgr, pgaudit, and other technologies.
Major Postgres contributions
EDB acquired 2ndQuadrant in 2020, and a lot of the contributions to Postgres were made by that company. Some of the most impactful contributions include:
HOT (Heat-Only Tuples) – Our first major contribution to Postgres in 2008 optimizes table data storage and retrieval by eliminating the need to update indexes with every table update.
Streaming Replication – Now one of Postgres’ most widely used features, streaming replication enables real-time data replication from primary to standby databases with minimal overhead.
Parallel Query – This performance enhancement uses multiple CPUs to accelerate queries, which is especially helpful for data analytics.
Table Partitioning – We simplified PostgreSQL's partitioning with SQL-standard declarative syntax, making it easier to use.
Logical replication – Rather than being restricted to duplicating an entire database cluster through physical replication, logical replication provides more flexibility and control over the process by facilitating duplication of specific databases or even individual tables.
MERGE Command – Previously, the average database application contained 12 merge commands, each requiring two days to convert manually. By contributing MERGE, we eliminated this major migration roadblock.
Contributions to PG v17
Among the other major features we contributed to PostgreSQL 17, we pushed especially hard to get incremental backup into the release. Incremental backup is a game-changer for handling bigger databases, especially with AI workloads. Beyond saving time and space during backups, it dramatically speeds up recovery to help reduce downtime.
While it takes a community to deliver Postgres releases, we’re proud that our team contributed more code to Postgres in 2024 than any other company. We also had the most patch authors in Postgres 17. Above all, we’re excited that there are so many new code contributors, which shows how PostgreSQL expertise is expanding.
Why is contributing to Postgres so important to EDB?
Contributing to Postgres is fundamental to our mission because it enables us to:
Deliver unmatched customer support – We write the code, so we understand it at the deepest level. When customers face critical issues like Postgres bugs, we can provide immediate patches while also contributing fixes upstream and making architectural improvements for better performance.
Expand the Postgres ecosystem – Our contributions help grow PostgreSQL's capabilities and adoption across industries.
Attract and grow top database talent – Contributing to Postgres releases increases our visibility and helps us recruit, retain, and support exceptional database engineers who want to make a meaningful impact. (We're hiring!)
Build a culture of community – By recognizing and celebrating contributions and the Postgres community, we’re creating a company culture focused on innovation and giving back.
Foster customer pride – Our 1600+ customers appreciate that their investment with us directly advances the open source community.
EDB’s commitment to driving Postgres forward
No longer merely an alternative database, PostgreSQL has become developers' first-choice database for new projects, and we’re working to keep it that way! As Peter Zaitsev, entrepreneur and co-founder of Percona so aptly put it, “it's good that there are other databases. It motivates us to go forward.”
Our strategic priorities include:
Increasing accessibility
Postgres wasn't the dominant database in the early 2000s—and the lack of Windows installers was one of the reasons why! Fortunately, this barrier has now been eliminated. In order to enable the deployment of Postgres everywhere, we provide installers for every single Postgres build and every environment. When a new Postgres version with important patches is released, we make it available the same day, through both our installers and products.
Preparing for tomorrow
We're actively evolving PostgreSQL to embrace emerging industry trends like AI integration, multi-platform deployments, and hardware innovations like GPUs and specialized CPUs. While these advancements take time, we're committed to ensuring PostgreSQL remains technologically relevant and forward-compatible with the computing landscape of tomorrow.
Driving Kubernetes Integration with CNCF
By open-sourcing EDB’s CloudNativePG Kubernetes operator and transferring its copyright to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), we're supporting PostgreSQL's adoption in Kubernetes environments while targeting CNCF incubation by 2025-2026. CloudNativePG is the first relational database to enter the CNCF sandbox since 2018.
Leading-edge EDB solutions
We’re always innovating to make Postgres better. Some of our most impactful solutions include:
EDB Postgres AI – Hybrid Control Plane
Our hybrid control plane delivers a unified cloud management experience across all your PostgreSQL deployments—on-premises, Kubernetes clusters, and cloud environments. Seamlessly roll out new deployments, manage upgrades, and implement high availability from a single interface. Boost operational productivity up to 30%, enhance visibility into 200+ metrics, and migrate to Postgres with 95% fewer application rewrites.
EDB Postgres Distributed
Our Postgres Distributed database eliminates downtime caused by planned upgrades, hardware failures, or entire data center/region outages. It offers the ability to deploy anywhere, 99.999% availability and 5x throughput over local replication, distributed data protection, and regulatory compliance features to meet SOC2, GDPR, PCI DSS and other requirements.
EDB Postgres Advanced Server
As one of our longest-standing database solutions, EDB Postgres Advanced Server combines PostgreSQL's innovation with enterprise-ready features with 95%+ Oracle compatibility to reduce migration risks and lower TCO. The platform includes enhanced security, performance optimization, and enterprise-grade support for mission-critical workloads.
PGAdmin
Our India-based team leads the development of PGAdmin, the most popular PostgreSQL management tool according to TimeScale DB surveys. We've consistently invested in its evolution and contributed these improvements back to the community. Learn more about PGAdmin and Postgres Enterprise Manager.
Our goal is to support PostgreSQL excellence
From providing an Oracle alternative 20 years ago to championing Postgres AI advancements and community growth, we’re helping shape a future where PostgreSQL remains the preferred database choice worldwide. We invite you to join us as we continue to make enterprise-grade database technology more accessible, powerful, and future-ready for all.