PostgreSQL
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PostgreSQL
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What is PostgreSQL?
PostgreSQL (alternately Postgres) is a free and open source object-relational database system boasting over 30 years of active development, reliability, feature robustness, and performance. It supports SQL and is designed to support various workloads flexibly.
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What is PostgreSQL?
PostgreSQL (alternately Postgres) is a free and open source object-relational database system boasting over 30 years of active development, reliability, feature robustness, and performance. It supports SQL and is designed to support various workloads flexibly.
What is PostgreSQL's best feature?
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.4.
Who uses PostgreSQL?
The most common users of PostgreSQL are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees) and the Computer Software industry.
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PostgreSQL is the most advanced and versatile DB system available and is well documented. It’s cool, and there is a lot of diversity among the people who help with it. PostgreSQL has a project (phAdmin) that allows us to carry out tasks using a friendly graphical user interface, making it an incredible database manager. It has a command-line interface for Linux and Windows that is simple to use. In addition, Golang and Python and their frameworks, such as Django for Python, can be integrated. A comprehensive documentation website makes learning about all of its features easy.
- It works well with external data sources and runs on platforms with stable performance.
- Clients can rest assured that their personal information will be safe and secure.
- Many forums discuss setup and usage, and most are free.
- Adding tooling applications to a computer is unlimited.
- PostgreSQL runs on many OS platforms and supports ANSI SQL, stored procedures, and triggers.
- Increasing horizontal scaling is complex, but PostgreSQL may have a solution for all replicas to accept operations.
- No column re-ordering and better data compression are required.
- PostgreSQL is often criticized for being slow and unsuitable for large-scale enterprise applications.
December 11, 2021
Best open source RDBMS
We are using PostgreSQL as the main RDBMS for our payment application where we mainly store customer data, accounting, and ledger data, etc. As well as in data warehousing along with NiFi and Metabase we use PostgreSQL as the main data storage; to collect data from multiple sources, analyze, and ETL into PostgreSQL.
- Sophisticated locking mechanism.
- Asynchronous replication.
- Nested database transactions.
- There should be some tool or way to perform migration from other RDBMS to Postgre easily.
- Postgre can store longer string values by cutting them into available column size, which is kind of not good as compared to other databases.
June 22, 2021
PostgreSQL Review
Using PostgreSQL in all aspects of the company. Using it for our front-end platform to display data. Using PostgreSQL as part of our pipeline looking up reference data. Also using it for reporting purposes as well. The data we have is structured, but with some unstructured data, the jsonb datatype support, also helps us considerably to store dynamic data generation. Helps us scale out our platform.
- Aggregation of data quickly for report generation
- Lookups of reference data vs looking up in files
- organization of data for quick references
- quick ansi sql functions vs writing out functions in program language
- regex isn't as strong
- parallelization of querying of data
- data distribution natural sharding
We are using PostgreSQL as a database for our microservices application. Since microservice is light by nature, performance is never a problem.
We have a lot of microservices applications since PostgreSQL is free, we could use as many database instances as we need without massive cost increase.
The main thing that we like is PostgreSQL supports the JSON column and query which is really useful in our use case.
We have a lot of microservices applications since PostgreSQL is free, we could use as many database instances as we need without massive cost increase.
The main thing that we like is PostgreSQL supports the JSON column and query which is really useful in our use case.
- Support the JSON column and able to query by the JSON value.
- Free to use.
- Has fairly high performance.
- Installation and configuration can be difficult for first time users.
- Somewhat hard to upgrade/update, especially for major releases.
- Less online documentation and resources available compared to MySQL or SQL Server.
PostgreSQL database is being used across the whole organization by different departments for different services/micro-services. It addresses one important business problem that is cost. We migrated from Oracle to PostgreSQL to save license cost without compromising on RDBMS requirements.
- Easy to manage.
- Vast number of extensions are available to meet most of the requirements.
- Simple database backup and restore.
- Accessing databases within the same database cluster can be done effectively instead of using dblink.
- Automatic suggestion on the optimal parameters based on stats.
June 05, 2021
Don't be afraid on adopting it. PostgreSQL delivers more features than most of the paid databases from big brands.
Currently, we are using PostgreSQL to support some DevOps operations, mainly related to monitoring (as a Zabbix database server) and configuration management (it is the database used by our Puppet/PuppetDB environment). We use it as a regular deployment as well as a Database as a service (on AWS RDS).
- Handle large amounts of data.
- It is scalable (for reading purposes).
- It is compatible with so many languages as the language for triggers and stored procedures.
- PostgreSQL could have a solution to accept operations on all replicas.
- Could improve its "full vacuum schema" in order to be less painful for applications.
- Could have an in-memory table type instead of having to create a partition on an in-memory file system.
June 02, 2021
PostgreSQL you don't want to stop using it
In our department PostgreSQL is used as the main database that supports our transactional systems, reaching a consensus for the use of a single database throughout the organization requires a joint effort that leads to a feasibility study and implementation that determine the best way forward to unify the use of a single database platform.
- The stability it offers, its speed of response and its resource management is excellent even in complex database environments and with low-resource machines.
- The large amount of resources it has in addition to the many own and third-party tools that are compatible that make productivity greatly increase.
- The adaptability in various environments, whether distributed or not, [is a] complete set of configuration options which allows to greatly customize the work configuration according to the needs that are required.
- The excellent handling of referential and transactional integrity, its internal security scheme, the ease with which we can create backups are some of the strengths that can be mentioned.
- PostgreSQL installation must be homogeneous across all supported operating systems
- It would be helpful to have an index of compatible tools, plugins or complementary applications within itself to increase productivity.
- Regarding the administration of PostgreSQL itself, it would be very helpful to have a dashboard that will show us the insecurities of security, stability and operability in order to have an overview of PostgreSQL behavior.
PostgreSQL is one of the databases we use for our systems and products. Most of our IT systems run on PostgreSQL, such as issue tracker and wiki. We also use PostgreSQL to store analytic data which would then be fed to analytic and reporting tools to generate graphs and dashboards.
- Supports and runs on most popular operating systems and environments.
- Most cloud vendors support PostgreSQL.
- Solid and reliable, PostgreSQL has been around for a very long time.
- Has a huge online community that can help you with any questions and challenges.
- Open source, so cost of initial ownership is much lower than Oracle, MS SQL Server.
- Horizontal scaling can be difficult.
- Has support for JSON type, but needs more work if compared to something like MongoDB.
May 19, 2021
Postgres - tons of people use it for a reason!!
We use Postgres for a variety of applications, from high availability/high traffic API services to simpler CRUD style single-page applications. It fulfills a need for a low-cost relational data store that has been tested and proven to work. Its use of common SQL is known by many engineers so the learning curve is very low.
- Ability to handle very large datasets, 100's of GB
- Great tooling, great selection of mature tools to pick from
- Available in most cloud platforms
- Easy to install and maintain
- Low learning curve for engineers
- I don't really have any big complaints, it's popular because it's good!
Postgre[SQL] is awesome, as it ha[s] lots of distinct things in itself. It is [a] highly extensible object relation database. We are using this for our current applications like Virtual Class and StudyShot purposes. We are storing larger pools of servers for virtual class purposes, which uses Postgre[SQL] as backend server. These applications are organization-wide products. Overall, Postgre[SQL] is superb in larger queries, where it is solving our day-to-day business problems in complex programs. Its performance and security both are satisfactory. Postgre[SQL] have features to extend which is a very good [quality].
It [is] platform independent, so we need not to worry about [having a] specific environment. Very good support for replication also relieves us from [the] data lost burden. Its cost for owning and maintaining [in] comparison to SQL server is low so it [suits us well].
It [is] platform independent, so we need not to worry about [having a] specific environment. Very good support for replication also relieves us from [the] data lost burden. Its cost for owning and maintaining [in] comparison to SQL server is low so it [suits us well].
- Built in Json support which usually takes less space and eliminates us from re-parsing again in application and can be indexed
- Support for large size data is awesome. Currently for loggings of analytics data we use it
- Postgre[SQL] is more secure which we have experienced. MySQL got corrupted but it retained our data.
- Its extension support is awesome. Through its inbuilt concurrent, we get faster results
- Its management is not easy as expected
- Data compression needs to be more better
- Clustering and replication need to be improved
- For JSON datatype, queries need to be better
May 14, 2021
Professional and Free
PostgreSQL open source relational data management system takes on a task behind a critical and important application running in our information systems infrastructure. Although we did not like the use of a separate model database for this application because it was different and critical at first, we are very pleased at the moment, it was unnecessary to hesitate.
- Offering high performance.
- It's free.
- It is an institutional solution. And its use in very large and important national projects.
- Good at security.
- No compression
- No machine learning included
May 14, 2021
A solid solution for data teams
- BI tool integration - Periscope/Sisense, Looker, etc.
- SQL is a common skill, and Postgres' dialect strikes a good balance between stability and usability
- JSON support
- Running PostgreSQL locally is a nightmare
- Hosted solutions like Amazon RDS are hard to use
- Did I mention how difficult it is to run Postgres locally?
May 02, 2021
PostgreSQL, the best data retrieval
At my current organization, we use PostgreSQL to obtain the most current data of our host system.
This is used by the IT department only, with data obtained from it distributed organizational wide. It allows us to obtain real-time data from our host system, rather than an overnight "batch" load of data.
This is used by the IT department only, with data obtained from it distributed organizational wide. It allows us to obtain real-time data from our host system, rather than an overnight "batch" load of data.
- Ease of use
- No downtime
- Real-time data
- The URL app works much smoother than the locally installed app.
PostgreSQL is currently at the core of everything we do. For our organization we knew that we needed a durable, feature rich and flexible database. We have various storage needs including traditional relational setups with auditing for our quoting and invoicing. Inherited structures for project standards that can adapt as needed. And dynamic JSON based data for unstructured data. With PostgreSQL there hasn't been a data problem we have not been able to solve. It allows us to collect flexible data and migrate it into structured data sets that can be utilized with traditional tooling.
- Runs on a variety of platforms with constant performance and features
- Data integrity is guaranteed
- Wide support for tooling
- Expert advise from core developers is easy to get
- Cloud support through RDS is stellar
- Many see PostgreSQL as slow or old
- Horizontal scaling not easy
- No column re-ordering
The use of PostgreSQL in our organization has allowed us to scale the number of implementations without worrying about costs associated with licenses.
We use PostgreSQLl for a variety of transactional systems, from remote sites to headquarters.
It allows us to standardize configurations and implementations throughout the organization, accelerating the number of implementations.
- Resilient software ensuring data integrity.
- Unlimited number of installations without worrying about costs associated with licensing.
- Offer a friendly alternative for configurations.
- Offer health monitoring functionalities.
April 20, 2021
PostgreSQL as Solution base database solution
We use PostgreSQL as our solutions database, we looked for a full featured database server that will be both reliable, with high performance and supported on our Linux CentOS based platforms. We preferred Open Source solutions as we did not want to increase our solution price.
Highnet Systems' SNS++ Notification Management solution is sold on license on premise solution, as such the customer need platform (Hardware or virtual server), Operating System, Database Server, WEB Server and finality our software. by selecting Open Source platforms we are able to provide our customer with great enterprise level solution at very small cost.
PostgreSQL give us great performance supporting organizations with millions of alerts per day, with complex alert handling solutions. We started using PostgreSQL more than 15 years ago and it is still great solution, with wide industry support, easy management and development tools and because we provide our solutions to big organizations it helps to relay on platform like PostgreSQL that is constantly developed to face both new demands, environments and security risks.
Highnet Systems' SNS++ Notification Management solution is sold on license on premise solution, as such the customer need platform (Hardware or virtual server), Operating System, Database Server, WEB Server and finality our software. by selecting Open Source platforms we are able to provide our customer with great enterprise level solution at very small cost.
PostgreSQL give us great performance supporting organizations with millions of alerts per day, with complex alert handling solutions. We started using PostgreSQL more than 15 years ago and it is still great solution, with wide industry support, easy management and development tools and because we provide our solutions to big organizations it helps to relay on platform like PostgreSQL that is constantly developed to face both new demands, environments and security risks.
- Well designed database solutions.
- Good support for development environments.
- Constantly developed.
- Wide availability in the industry.
- Management platform not as good as I expected.
- Does not have schema versioning.
April 08, 2021
NoSQL workloads shine on PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is used across a wide number of systems. Ranging from customer-facing primary data storage of traditional relational data to using it more like a NoSQL data store with the JSON & JSONB data types. Analytical workloads in some parts of the business are serviced by PostgreSQL as well.
- Permissive licensing
- JSONB data types allow for migration from NoSQL data stores that haven't scaled as well as would have like when providing consistency guarantees.
- Various index types to support full text search.
- Extensions & customization of the database.
- Geo-spatial support with routing support.
- Default tuning isn't optimized for modern hardware
- No native support for multi-master setups
- Scaling out with partitions across multiple servers can create transaction issues in some scenarios
April 08, 2021
PostgreSQL delivers on its promise.
PostgreSQL is the primary datastore for Sphere. All of the mission-critical customer and product data which underpins the product offering is there. PostgreSQL was the right choice because so many of the data models that we use are relational to the customer's user account,.
- Reliability - There is absolutely no issue with uptime or data integrity.
- Flexibility - The wide range of data types which are supported gives us immense flexibility in terms of what data we can store.
- Speed - Even at our busiest, we are able to count on the performance of the engine matching our needs.
- Internal features - Thanks to the wealth of internal features, we have less external dependencies to perform common business tasks.
- The query syntax for JSON fields is unwieldy when you start getting into complex queries with many joins.
- I wish there was a distinction (a flag) you could set for automated scripts vs working in the psql CLI, which would provide an 'Are you sure you want to do X?' type prompt if your query is likely to affect more than a certain number of rows. Especially on updates/deletes. Setting the flag in the headless(scripted) flow would disable the prompt.
- Better documentation around JSON and Array aggregation, with more examples of how the data is transformed.
I've used PostgreSQL for managing the database for agriculture support system with elements of spatial analysis by PostGIS extension. This was an internal software (not intended for public markets), used by agronomists, management, and shareholders of agricultural holdings in South Russia, Volgograd region. The database includes records about crop rotations, vegetation indices, field observation data, weather data, etc. By this info, used in analytic to achieve better productivity and reduce expenses for common field works, used to grow bulk crops, such as wheat, corn, and sunflower.
- Advanced spatial capabilities by using PostGIS extension
- Very fast data processing and support of native ANSI SQL language syntax allows maintaining capability and scalability of database
- Fast data aggregation, even by SQL or stored routines/functions
- Well documented, free for use, great community. A lot of examples, and for this reason - lesser threshold for junior developers to start with
- Clustering and distributed processing is difficult to use and maintain
April 01, 2021
Postgres review
I have used Postgres across 3-4 different companies as the main application database for half a dozen web applications.
- General database functionality
- Json and hash storage types
- Reliability
- Continue advancement with json/hash storage and key-value store solutions
April 27, 2020
PostgreSQL - The database that fits all
PostgreSQL is used in several Departmental Information Systems across the Bank, from open source systems which operates with the DBMS to in-house developed systems like the one we use for Operational and Technology Risk Assessment, and Asset Management.
We use other DBMSs like MySQL (MariaDB) and Microsoft SQL Server also, so we can compare them against each other.
- It is an excellent DBMS, which is scalable, performs well, allows replication, supports ACID and a big subset of the SQL standard (in several cases, it is a superset).
- Is much better at data types than the other DBMSs, with a more rich semantics, with geo-spatial types, complex numbers, etc.
- It supports several methods of indexation, including B-trees, Genetic Algorithms based indexes, and GIN indexes that accelerates full-text searches.
- Its flexibility to select from a variety of procedural languages to make stored procedures is astonishing.
- The performance of PostgreSQL has been enhanced through the years, but always is better to have as much performance as we can.
- The replication services could be done directly within the database, and more easily.
- The Object Orientation of the Database could be extended, and albeit it manages inheritance of tables, and accepts XML and JSON as primary types, it would be wonderful if one could attach methods more easily to tables (to make them more like classes), and instances (rows for example).
February 14, 2020
Battle-tested-never-data-loss alternative to MySQL
We in the software engineering department use Postgres to permanently store most of our customer's information that is needed by the app--anywhere from their settings, login information (of course user's passwords are encrypted and salted), to the work they've created in the app. The web app writes to Postgres whenever our users need to update their info and saves their work and reads from the app to display the webpages. What's cool is that Postgres also has great user management, so we also gave read-only access to only a few parts of the database for the finance department who want to know how much the users are using the app to charge them accurately, and also to customer support who wants to see user data in order to help users debug issues.
- As I mentioned before, Postgres has an incredibly flexible and simple-to-use user/role management system. First, there are users--login information so that you can hand out to individual users. Then, there are roles, which specify read and/or write access to all the tables that you can assign to users. Through this system, you can easily control who can read and update which tables, and the system is very well-tested, so there's no concern with users accessing or writing to data that they shouldn't be unless your Postgres admin really messes up!
- I could write pages on this and would need to reference the Postgres manual itself to do this justice, but Postgres is dang scalable! There are so many ways to scale it. Postgres has undergone active development by some of the brightest engineers for over 30 years now, and the result is that Postgres has so many ways you can scale it besides just upping the SSD and CPU and memory speed. You can scale reads horizontally through multiple slaves that handle all the reads. You can add highly optimized indices to your tables. You can change columns to JSONB types for super fast JSON queries. You can turn on special caches to bulk writes so they don't overwhelm the disk. Between those three options and other tips and tricks experienced Postgres admins have, you can get a lot out of them. There's a reason Yahoo stuck with Postgres for decades up until their main database even past the point of 4 Petabytes and 10k writes/second!
- Postgres, simply put, has achieved super-wide industry adoption (6% market share), which means it's really easy to integrate it into your stack and hire knowledgeable developers to service Postgres. All the major database libraries of the common web frameworks that I know are out there (e.g. Rails-ActiveRecord, Spring-Hibernate, Play Scala-Slick) have out-of-the-box deep Postgres support, with no extra configuration needed to get your web app to start reading and writing to Postgres. I also know many universities in the US include Postgres in their curriculum too (e.g. UC Berkeley). It's really easy to hire either new grads or experienced software engineers for positions that require Postgres knowledge.
- If you are comparing Postgres to MySQL and you want to use JSON, know that Postgres has better performance and features on indexing JSON blobs simply because Postgres beat MySQL to the JSON game by several years. I haven't used MySQL's JSON support before, but that's what my co-workers say (and it's true that Postgres definitely started support MySQL years earlier).
- If you are comparing Postgres to MySQL, MySQL does have superior write performance. I don't want to get toooo technical here because it involves knowledge of how deep database internals work, but if you most know Uber actually switched from Postgres to MySQL for this exact reason and wrote a great article about why here: https://eng.uber.com/MySQL-migration/.
- Anecdotally, the Postgres replication process for keeping slaves up to date with the primary is a bit buggy. I say anecdotally because it just happened to us here at my company. A schema update made to the primary didn't make it to a replica for almost a minute and caused probably 50% of the traffic to our website to see 500 internal server error pages for the whole time, and we didn't know why until we dug deep into Postgres logs on that replica.
- Postgres' migration from 9 to 10 was a disaster. If you want to be on the latest and greatest, which all tech companies should want, migrating your existing database from 9 to 10 was a real pain. Sure, there's a tool to do it for you, but it involved hours of downtime for our mere 4 TB of data. I wish the Postgres maintainers had put more thought into the tool to make it faster or do it bit-by-bit without downtime. And don't get me started on how confusing the configuration for the migration was....
January 20, 2020
A robust, free, and high quality DB
As a company that does a lot of consultation work in software development and database and system administrating on high levels, knowing multiple RDBMS's is essential. PostgreSQL is often required by our partners, and we use it from time to time when the business choice lands on it. Most of the time we like to work with Oracle tools, but PostgreSQL proved itself to be a viable alternative for many use cases.
- Highly reliable RDBMS for free.
- Has tons of features that other free solutions do not have.
- In-memory mode would be useful for many cases.
January 16, 2020
PostgreSQL is fast, cheap and easy (and fully featured!)
It is our primary database engine utilized in the capture, storage, and processing of all company data. We were facing massive licensing fees and large deployment times in order to deploy Microsoft SQL Server at scale. We opted instead to deploy PostgreSQL in replicated pairs (50+ and growing) in a matter of minutes! We were delighted with the ease of use and replication abilities, not to mention the amazing performance.
- Transaction Speed
- Customized Tuning
- Active/Active High Availability
- PGTune could be more extensive
October 12, 2019
PostgreSQL is a Well Poised for the Future, Venerable, More Than a Database Solution for Many
PostgreSQL is used across the entire organization and in more than one instance. PostgreSQL was already a part of a wide scale Ruby On Rails implementation and thus was a natural fit for the use in data analytics in form of data marts, data inter-exchange, reporting, and ad-hoc data storage and retrieval.
PostgreSQL fulfills a role of a dedicated and/or per-application or solution data storage engine. Its versatility and flexibility combined with exceptional user community support make a stand-out product. Integration or migration with AWS Redshift is easy and seamless. PostgreSQL has a near-complete ANSI SQL language implementation which makes it very handy for data extraction and analytics.
PostgreSQL fulfills a role of a dedicated and/or per-application or solution data storage engine. Its versatility and flexibility combined with exceptional user community support make a stand-out product. Integration or migration with AWS Redshift is easy and seamless. PostgreSQL has a near-complete ANSI SQL language implementation which makes it very handy for data extraction and analytics.
- Flexibility and Unicode compliance combined with nearly full SQL features support makes PostgreSQL an ideal tool to conducting complex data analyses
- Ease of administering PostgreSQL, SSL, SSO support make it possible to operate a very private and secure data repository
- Programmability of PostgreSQL is superb. Multiple standard programming languages are supported, PL/SQL flavour of programming is possible
- PostgreSQL runs on any platform
- Replication, high availability are some of the enterprise features that anyone can implement on its own
- Free, relatively mature for everyday use client tools
- Most languages have native drivers
- Superb support for JSON makes it not stop by thinking of NoSQL
- Not exactly parallel, means a single query often is run in a sequential manner, no threads. The optimizer is hard to understand and deliver quicker queries faster is not often possible (MVCC model)
- Index operations are slow
- Can chew up on the CPU quite a bit
- Comes in too many pieces, here I mean there are way too many diverse extensions that often belong to different vendors or providers
- The "schemas" are over-thought
- Lack of some minor basic DML features as MERGE/UPSERT (however can be done with "On Conflict"), also lacking an ability to reposition table column, case sensitive when it comes to database objects
- No explicit user control over data compression