How Postgres Will Power the Internet of Things

Featured article by Pierre Fricke, Open Source industry veteran and  VP of Product Marketing at EnterpriseDB

Many solution platforms and data technologies come to mind in the context of harnessing the power and promise of the Internet of Things (IoT). A relational database does not typically top the list. The potential of an interconnected world of smart devices communicating with one another to meet human demands instead emphasizes new solutions and new ways to connect and analyze data.

But even as the IoT dawns, the fundamentals don’t change, no matter how many different new devices suddenly begin transmitting data over the Internet. Data will need to be understood in a broader context whether generated by a smart refrigerator, customer smartphone applications or a city’s railroad crossings. Line of business executives and data scientists alike will still need to understand how IoT generated data relates to other corporate data.

Indeed, the relational database will continue to occupy a central role in the IoT of things. And no other database is better positioned to help companies evolve their data infrastructures toward an IoT future than Postgres Plus from EnterpriseDB.

Postgres has the technology required to integrate disparate data sources and the capacity to expand along with the range of data types from traditional relational to unstructured data types like JSON. And just as important is the power of Postgres to transform the economics of the data center so organizations can support their database management needs while redirecting critical budget to strategic data-driven initiatives as more and more devices begin streaming data.

Bridging the Disconnected

The explosion of mobile, social and machine data streams have already spurred data professionals to expand their solution portfolios. The typical data center today contains a patchwork of data management technologies. From enterprise class relational databases to standalone, niche NoSQL-only solutions to specialized extensions, the arsenal for managing data has become more diverse.

One of the greatest challenges posed by the IoT is one many data center managers are struggling with today – integrating data from disparate new sources so it can be analyzed and understood and used alongside existing data from longstanding solutions. In other words, lining up data from Hadoop clusters or MongoDB deployments alongside relational tables and seeing the big picture or some meaningful snapshots.

Postgres has emerged as the optimal data management solution for integration challenges with a clever feature called a Foreign Data Wrapper that can integrate data from disparate sources, like MongoDB, Hadoop and MySQL. Foreign Data Wrappers (FDWs) link external data stores to Postgres databases so users access and manipulate data from foreign sources as if it were part of the native Postgres tables.

Indeed, FDWs enable Postgres to act as the central hub, a federated database, in the enterprise. It does this by using the JSON datatype, one of the important features Postgres has added in recent releases that support NoSQL capabilities.

Advances in NoSQL capabilities alongside longstanding relational database features have given Postgres the ability to support the new unstructured data types and programming methods common to many NoSQL products. Using JSON/JSONB, Postgres supports unstructured and semi-structured implementations and combines the data with relational tables, all while maintaining compliance with the Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability (ACID) principles of relational technologies as well as centralized business processing rules and logic.

This is possible because Postgres is extensible. Unique in the database world, Postgres was developed with expansion in mind, making it easy to incorporate new data types, indexing schemes, languages, and much more without de-stabilizing or compromising existing features.

The IoT promises a great transformation in enterprises’ ability to holistically understand the business and customer environment in real time and deliver superior customer engagement. Postgres is well positioned to be a major data platform for the IoT by enabling IT to transform their core DBMSes to free up money to then use Postgres to support these new IoT applications and bridging the two worlds.

Value for the Enterprise and its Customers

Postgres FDWs offer IT organizations the ability to leverage existing data deployments with an enterprise-ready relational DBMS with NoSQL capabilities in a unified platform. By bringing these disparate data sources together, IT can offer up holistic views of key entities like customers and partners. These holistic views allow new applications of engagement to make intelligent recommendations and take targeted actions on the behalf of their users and customers. This smart, focused customer engagement is the forefront of industry leadership and customer satisfaction and underlines the crucial business value FDWs can play in today’s digital age.