Postgres Is Becoming the Default Database

A few years ago the advice was to pick a specialized database for every job. Increasingly, the advice is to start with Postgres and only leave when you have a reason.

Why it keeps winning

It is reliable, well understood, and extensible. Full-text search, JSON documents, geospatial data, and vector similarity search are all available without another system to run and keep in sync.

Serverless changes the operations story

Hosted options such as Neon give you branching, scale-to-zero, and connection pooling. Spinning up a database per preview environment used to be a chore, and now it is a setting.

Things to watch

• Use a connection pooler in serverless environments, because many short-lived functions can exhaust connections.
• Keep migrations in version control and run them in CI.
• Add indexes based on real queries, not guesses.

When to leave

Extreme write volume, very specialized workloads, or a team that already runs something else well. For most products, though, one boring database is a feature.