Platform · 1996–now · Cloud Scale
PostgreSQL
The open-source relational default — JSON, extensions, and enough correctness to survive every NoSQL wave.
Why PostgreSQL stuck
Postgres stuck because ACID, extensibility, and ops familiarity beat fashion. It absorbed use cases that once required specialists — including embeddings via pgvector. DuckDB took the in-process analytics job; Supabase put a BaaS API on the same engine. The fad was declaring SQL dead; the residue is still Postgres in production.
Compare with
Related
Platform · 1974–now
SQL / Relational
Declarative data that outlived every ORM fashion cycle. Postgres and friends keep winning by being boring.
Platform · 2009–now
MongoDB
Document DB that became a punchline, then a grown-up product. Survived by getting serious about transactions and ops.
Platform · 2009–now
Redis
Fast structures in memory. The protocol stuck; in 2024 the BSD project forked as Valkey after the license change.
Platform · 2023–now
Postgres + pgvector
Embeddings back in the database you already run. The default for mid-market RAG — not the quiet alternative.
Platform · 2019–now
DuckDB
SQLite's cousin for analytics. Columnar SQL in the same process as the script — no cluster to feed.
Platform · 2020–now
Supabase
Firebase's shape on Postgres. Auth, storage, and a database you can still dump.