There are two particular sets of features that continue to keep me very excited about the momentum of Postgres. And while PostgreSQL has had some great momentum in the past few years these features may give it an entirely new pace all together. One is extensions, which is really its own category. Dimitri Fontaine was talking about doing a full series just on extensions, so here’s hoping he does so I dont have to :)

One subset of extensions which I consider entirely separate is the other thing, which is foreign data wrappers or FDWs. FDWs allow you to connect to other data sources from within Postgres. From there you can query them with SQL, join across disparate data sets, or join across different systems. Recently I had a good excuse to give the postgres_fdw a try. And while I’ve blogged about the Redis FDW previously, the Postgres one is particularly exciting because with PostgreSQL 9.3 it will ship as a contrib module, which means all Postgres installers should have it… you just have to turn it on.