The emergence of Postgres as a de facto standard for new development projects has surprised many IT observers. However, one group that remains unfazed is Crunchy Data, a South Carolina-based company that has been building a Postgres hosting business for transactional workloads for over a decade. With its recent product expansion, Crunchy Data is now aiming to take Postgres into the realm of analytics.
When Crunchy Data was founded in 2012, Postgres barely registered on the data management radar. At the time, leading tech publications were focused on new open-source projects for big data, such as Apache Hadoop and NoSQL databases like MongoDB. However, in conversations with tech leaders at large companies, the would-be Crunchy Data co-founders discovered a surprising demand for Postgres services, according to Paul Laurence, the president and co-founder of Crunchy Data.
“They were absolutely using Hadoop and MongoDB. But where they felt the need most was around Postgres,” Laurence tells Datanami. “They were making a bet on a new open-source data management toolbox, where they had these NoSQL databases. That was part of where they were going. But they also saw this as an opportunity to shift towards open source on the relational and SQL side. And they had evaluated the landscape and selected Postgres as kind of their big bet.”
While the commercial open-source business model was still relatively new, Crunchy Data took a contrarian approach by focusing on a non-distributed relational database that was already 26 years old. “Postgres was largely dismissed when we first started. It was really all about Hadoop and MongoDB,” said Laurence. “It was very contrarian at the time…Other folks would say ‘You guys are crazy. What are you guys doing starting a SQL database company? SQL is dead. That’s not a real thing anymore.’”
As it turned out, SQL was far from dead. Within a few years, leading NoSQL databases began adding SQL interfaces, and the race to add SQL engines to Hadoop was driven by a desire to match the new computing framework to existing skillsets and toolsets.
Getting Crunchy with IT
Crunchy Data wasn’t just about maintaining the relational data model and the SQL language; it was about Postgres, the open-source database created by Mike Stonebreaker in 1986. When enterprise CIOs and CTOs surveyed the market, they saw other relational databases, but Postgres stood out as the intersection of “open source,” “relational,” and “not Oracle.”
“Suffice it to say,” Laurence says, “from that point forward, the momentum behind Postgres has just continued to grow.”
Crunchy Data’s first offering, Crunchy Postgres, mirrored Red Hat’s enterprise Linux offering: a trusted distribution of Postgres. Large corporations and governmental agencies adopted this product and managed the database themselves. As containers became the preferred method for running virtualized IT services, Crunchy Data developed its own Kubernetes operator and sold it along with its distribution of open-source Postgres as Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes.
With the rise of the cloud business model in 2020, Crunchy Data responded by delivering a hosted version of its Postgres distribution called Crunchy Bridge. Customers responded positively to this offering, which was the first hosted Postgres offering from a pure-play database company.
Earlier this year, Crunchy Data ventured into analytics with the launch of Crunchy Bridge for Analytics. This offering serves as a query engine that runs atop Parquet data stored in Amazon S3 buckets, eliminating the need for complex ETL data pipelines. It also features a vectorized execution engine to speed up response times for traditional analytics and OLAP workloads.
Postgres for Analytics
Earlier this month, Crunchy Data announced support for Apache Iceberg in Crunchy Bridge for Analytics, enabling customers to leverage their investment in Postgres for lakehouse-style analytics using the popular open-source table format. Craig Kerstiens, the chief product officer for Crunchy Data, explains the rationale behind this move.
“Why Postgres? Because there’s a huge ecosystem of everything that sits on top,” Kerstiens says. “Whether it’s geospatial with PostGIS or vector search with pgvector, or full text search. Looking at the ecosystem of tools on top, whether it’s Power BI or Metabase…It’s a vast, vast ecosystem of all sorts of tooling that sits on top and knows how to work with it.”
Crunchy Data’s analytics offering isn’t open source, but it strictly adheres to Postgres standards by functioning as a Postgres plug-in or extension, Kerstiens says. “We don’t lag behind on Postgres. We’re not going to be frozen on a version from 10 years ago. We’re able to stay current,” he says. “It’s basically an embedded analytics query engine that just works. You don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to know how it works. To you, it still looks just like Postgres.”
Customers Demand Postgres
Postgres adoption shows no sign of slowing down, and that’s good news for Crunchy Data, which, despite adopting a “West Coast crunchy business model,” is based in Charleston, South Carolina. Now in its 13th year, Crunchy Data has grown to more than 100 employees and 500 customers, with more undoubtedly on the way.
That success sometimes leads to interesting questions, says Kerstiens, who helped to scale one of the first hosted Postgres offerings as a Heroku developer. “Every week, I have someone say ‘Can you run Mongo for me? Can you run Redis?’ No, we’re focused on Postgres,” Kerstiens says. “But that kind of customer love and amazing Postgres experience is really where we focus foundationally.”
While the rest of the data management world zigged with Hadoop and NoSQL, Crunchy Data zagged with scale-up, relational tech. It may have looked like a gutsy bet at the time, but the Laurences had what turned out to be an ace card hidden up their sleeve: a willingness to listen to customer input.
“We started because we had some good customers and some folks who were betting on Postgres,” Laurence says. “At the time, we had a very bad website and we’re getting inbound emails and calls from Fortune 50 companies saying, ‘This looks like exactly what we need. We’re investing in Postgres as we go forward and we need someone to come in and help us understand how we do that and enterprise setting.’”
“It’s continued to surprise and impress even us when we made that bet initially. Its adoption has really been impressive,” Laurence continues. “Postgres is all we do. We’ve been a Postgres company from the beginning, supporting organizations of all sizes to be successful with Postgres. There’s no shortage of data options out there. If you’re working with us, it’s because you have a Postgres-centric view.”
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