In some of the Query Exercises posts here, you might have noticed links over to similar query exercises at SmartPostgres.com, and the free read-only version of the Stack Overflow database I’m hosting there. I’ve held off the questions for long enough: it’s time to discuss what I’m up to.

First off, BrentOzar.com is staying Microsoft-focused. The ~100K of you who subscribe and visit regularly can breathe a sigh of relief. I’m not going to shove Postgres down your throat, hahaha. From time to time, at the bottom of SQL Server focused posts, I may add a section talking about how Postgres approaches the same problem, but only if I think it’s really interesting learning.

The blog posts, videos, classes, etc here at BrentOzar.com will be for people who work with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and Amazon RDS SQL Server every day. My volume of blog posts won’t be declining here – in fact, because I’m reusing the same homework challenges across both SQL Server and Postgres, I’m actually worried about the post count going up, hahaha. I’ve got stuff scheduled out for over a month already.

The new SmartPostgres.com is a separate site that is focused on developers and data professionals who work with PostgreSQL every day. It is NOT “Postgres for SQL Server people.” Don’t subscribe over there unless you use Postgres as part of your job. If you’re only just mildly curious, stay here at BrentOzar.com, because I already overwhelm your in-box and because I’ll include neat Postgres trivia over here.

When I started building SmartPostgres, I decided to host a public-facing Stack Overflow database on AWS Aurora Postgres Serverless because I wanted the simplest possible approach for people to follow along with the blog posts and training exercises. The typical SmartPostgres reader may never actually install a database server, ever.

Over here at BOU, I would absolutely love to host a free public SQL Server with the Stack Overflow database, but there are 4 major problems with that:

• SQL Server licensing is hella expensive. (No, not Express Edition, because it only works for tiny databases and would be utterly overwhelmed each time I publish a blog post.)
• Azure SQL DB doesn’t automatically scale up/down in milliseconds. (Microsoft’s auto-scaling is way, way behind Aurora.)
• A lot of the BOU blog posts involve making changes to tables & indexes. I can’t do that on a shared read-only database. (For SmartPostgres, I’m focusing more on readers that may not have carte blanche on the database.)
• The target audience of this blog is mostly used to building their own lab database servers anyway. (There are definitely readers here who’ve never installed SQL Server or deployed an Azure SQL DB, but they’re in the relative minority.)

So, why Postgres? I think it’s the best-positioned database for the next decade. It’s open source, it’s powerful, all of the cloud vendors offer a flavor of it, and perhaps most interestingly, all of the cloud vendors are trying to extend it in proprietary ways to be the best place to host your Postgres databases. This isn’t some new revelation for me – I’ve believed it for several years, and it’s why we picked Postgres for the SQL ConstantCare back end years ago. Heck, even at Microsoft Build this week, the number of Postgres mentions absolutely dwarfed the mentions of SQL Server.

I am absolutely not telling you that you need to rewrite existing SQL Server apps in Postgres. You don’t. The overall Microsoft data platform is fine (although even still, 2022 isn’t ready), and you could continue using it for years. I certainly plan to keep blogging about it here for years. It’s just that now I’m writing somewhere else, too, for another audience.