A growing ten-person SaaS company finally outgrows the database its developer set up by hand on a single virtual machine — backups are a cron job nobody has tested, and a restart means downtime. The obvious next step is a managed database service, and the obvious shortlist is the big three: Amazon RDS, Azure SQL …

Most small businesses end up with either PostgreSQL or MySQL not by deliberate choice but by default — the hosting stack their developer knows, the ORM the framework assumed, the tutorial they followed three years ago. That choice often works fine until the application grows and the team starts hitting edge cases: a …