Timescale, the maker of TimescaleDB, has announced the results of its 2022 State of PostgreSQL survey providing developers unique insight into the PostgreSQL market. Key findings from this year’s report include why respondents use PostgreSQL, how they contribute to the community, adoption across organizations, and favorite tools and extensions.

Over three-quarters of respondents report using PostgreSQL for personal projects. 95% of all respondents use PostgreSQL at work, and 73.5% use Postgres for both personal and professional projects.

Open source ranked as the #1 reason people choose PostgreSQL (19.3%), followed by reliability (16.5%) and extensions (9.9%). This shows that open source continues to be a high value proposition for most users.

Also, 44% of PostgreSQL users with 15+ years of experience have contributed to PostgreSQL at least once. Among those with less than 15 years of experience, only 12% have contributed to PostgreSQL. This percentage represents a great opportunity for the PostgreSQL community to welcome new people and ideas into the fold.

The majority of respondents (76.2%) identified technical documentation as their preferred way of learning about PostgreSQL, followed by long-form blog posts (51.5%) and short-form blog posts (43.3%). Respondents with less than five years of PostgreSQL experience prefer video over long-form and short-form blog posts.

One of the most powerful aspects of PostgreSQL is its rich extensibility model. Developers mix and match several purpose-built extensions to help them build more compelling applications. This year’s list of most favored extensions is stable compared to last year: PostGIS, TimescaleDB, pg_stat_statements, pgcrypto and pg_trgm.

Compared to 2019 and 2021, fewer respondents reported self-managing their PostgreSQL database. It appears that PostgreSQL users are increasingly using DBaaS providers for deploying PostgreSQL.