The State of Data Survey 2024

Speaker 0: Hey. How's it going? I'm Matt on the marketing team here at Directus. Data discussions really aren't the stuff of legend. And in fact, when we put this survey together, at first, there was a couple of, like, raised eyebrows like, data, really?

Is that what we want to do? What do you know? A month later, we had a huge flood of responses. 782 developers told us how they're using data in their projects. That tells us that, you know, data isn't dull.

There's just nobody talking about it in the right way. We're going to make data exciting again. Here are the 6 things that we learned that we thought were really interesting, or 2 of these actually really shocked us when we found out. Number 1 is that Postgres leads the pack. It is the choice of over 63% of the developers we surveyed, that they're using in their projects currently.

The number 2 thing, slightly related, but of all the database types when developers are starting new projects, over 57% of them said that they prefer relational databases all over all other types. Even asked our CTO, Reich, about it. And he said, know, the most likely reason is that a vast majority of data applications have some sort of schema consistency need for type safety and expectability. In NoSQL, you can quickly end up effectively reimplementing a lot of the things that a SQL database already offers out of the box. The number 3 thing we found that was really interesting to us was that developers are leaning towards cloud hosted database solutions.

So by a wide margin too. Cloud leads, 68% of respondents prefer hosting with solutions like AWS or Azure, versus, you know, managed database services like DigitalOcean or on prem servers. This one, I think, was so shocking because it was so lopsided. 94% of our survey respondents said they prefer working with REST APIs as opposed to GraphQL. We kinda went into this thinking that cost was gonna be the primary factor, to consider when hosting databases.

And in fact, it is a consideration, but it's not the most important. I think what this tells us is that developers are prioritizing performance and reliability and ease of use over how much it costs, which is still a consideration, but not what's driving, decisions at the end of the day. Taking this a step further, actually, we asked what the primary factors they think hosting should be charging for. And the top 3 in order were, machine resource utilization, so, like, RAM and CPU, storage space, and, actually, number of read and write options, which was interesting. The least popular way to price hosting, was by charging on the number of database records.

So just an interesting little finding there. But, yeah. Number 6 was the most shocking thing we found. Over 64% of respondents said that they're using AI for cogeneration. So despite all of this, like loud people in the room talking about, like, AI is bad for development, I think there's a lot of people quietly actually using this to become better at their job and learning how to implement and the things that they're doing.

Actually, going a little bit deeper on this, we asked 2 questions. If AI was too risky for data analysis to influence decision making, on average, sentiment was neutral. But when it comes to using AI to actually interact with the database with, like, CRUD permissions, Overwhelming sentiment was like, please do not do that. That is way too risky, which makes sense. So those are the 6 big takeaways, learnings we add just from a surface evaluation of the results that we got in the survey.

Hopefully, these were interesting to you as they were to us. And again, like, data isn't boring. It's just how are people using it? How are we framing it? Hopefully, we need some more discussions around this, because we're data nerds at the end of the day.

And what we're gonna do is basically put together a series that we call data drops, where we're gonna release an article, with, like, a really interesting insight, because it's one thing to know what the trends are. But we think it's more important to understand, like, why they vary from a startup in Silicon Valley as opposed to a seasoned freelancer in Berlin. So if you wanna get up to date on those and get nice little nuggets in your inbox, make sure you sign up for a newsletter. It goes out once a month. You can sign up in our docs.

You can sign up on our, main blog, But we'd love to have you sign up and just get these once a month newsletters. Appreciate the time today, and, have a good one.