Why Postgres Is Emerging As The Default Database For AI Applications
Techstrong.ai, Tuesday, February 17th, 2026
In this Techstrong.ai Leadership Insights interview, pgEdge CEO Phillip Merrick explains how the open source Postgres database has become a de facto standard for deploying AI applications. He discusses Postgres' flexibility, ecosystem momentum, and its growing role in supporting distributed data architectures required for modern AI workloads.
While early AI conversations centered on vector databases and specialized data stores, Merrick argues that Postgres already had the momentum before generative AI took off. Developers were standardizing on it for its flexibility and extensibility, and that foundation carried forward into AI workloads. Rather than being displaced, Postgres has expanded to absorb new requirements through extensions that support vector embeddings, document models and distributed architectures.