Recently, EnterpriseDB (EBD), a significant contributor to PostgreSQL, announced the general availability (GA) of its BigAnimal offering. The offering is a fully-managed PostgreSQL database in the cloud with compatibility for Oracle database technology.

According to an EDB blog post on the GA announcement, customers of BigAnimal can benefit from the cloud hosting environment – Azure initially and migrate their Oracle databases to PostgreSQL on Azure with almost no changes – and still leverage their investments in code, skill sets, and resources. 

Source: https://www.enterprisedb.com/products/biganimal-cloud-postgresql

The cloud offering will offer users the same experience as the EDB PostgreSQL on-premise with complete control through a superuser account to tweak database internals, and also the ability to use their existing PostgreSQL skill sets, incorporate the database into their DevOps pipelines, and leverage EDB Postgres Advanced enterprise capabilities, such as enhanced security, performance management, and compatibility with Oracle database technology. 

Ed Boyajian, president & CEO at EDB, told InfoQ:

Big Animal brings our unique compatibility with Oracle database technology, extremely high availability, and deep Postgres expertise to Microsoft Azure for the first time. In addition, we run it for you inside your own account, giving you ultimate control to tune and configure the database to your needs and leverage your spend commitments.

Today multiple public cloud vendors offer a fully-managed PostgreSQL database in the cloud. For example, Microsoft offers Azure Database for PostgreSQL, while AWS provides Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL and Google Cloud SQL. None of them provide Oracle database compatibility or features; however, EDB does, as Boyajian also told InfoQ:

In our many conversations with customers, they were clear about what was missing from existing PostgreSQL offerings. As a result, they’re looking to move off of Oracle, put their most demanding and serious workloads in the cloud, and take advantage of the flexibility and scalability that those environments have to offer. With BigAnimal, we took everything we learned and delivered a transformational technology that allows enterprises to fully move all their applications to the cloud.

Currently, BigAnimal is only available in the Azure Marketplace. Jozef De Vries, senior vice president, product development at EDB, told InfoQ:

We chose Azure to start because a large portion of our customer base is already moving workloads to Azure or planning to. However, we have every intention to be a fully-fledged multi-cloud provider, have other customers on other clouds, and plan to roll out support for AWS and GCP throughout 2022.