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PostgreSQL has a wide range of use cases across various industries and organizations. It is commonly used as a primary data storage …
Overview
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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PostgreSQL for Beginners - Demos on pgbouncer
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PostgreSQL demo with CPP on Ubuntu Linux
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Spring Boot + Vue.js example | Spring Data JPA + REST + PostgreSQL CRUD Demo
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ASP.Net Core Web API con Docker Compose, PostgreSQL y EF Core
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Demo: Replicating Oracle Database to PostgreSQL - TechXperts
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postgresql conf demo
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What is PostgreSQL?
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What is PostgreSQL?
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PostgreSQL Technical Details
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|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.3.
The most common users of PostgreSQL are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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PostgreSQL has a wide range of use cases across various industries and organizations. It is commonly used as a primary data storage solution for traditional relational data in customer-facing systems, serving as a reliable and scalable option. Additionally, PostgreSQL is utilized as a NoSQL data store with JSON and JSONB data types, offering flexibility and versatility for developers. Users appreciate its near-complete ANSI SQL language implementation, making it handy for data extraction and analytics. PostgreSQL is also valued for its ease of integration or migration with AWS Redshift, enabling seamless data transfer between platforms. Moreover, it serves as a dedicated and per-application data storage engine, catering to the diverse needs of different business units. Whether it's for data analytics, reporting, ad-hoc data storage and retrieval, or building high-traffic API services, PostgreSQL proves to be a stable and cost-effective solution for various use cases.
Reliability and Performance: Users have consistently praised PostgreSQL for its reliability and performance, with many reviewers stating that they have experienced no downtime or issues related to the database. Some users also mentioned that PostgreSQL's performance is exceptionally fast, providing them with great speed in their operations.
Ease of Use and Flexibility: Many users find PostgreSQL easy to use and appreciate the availability of good open-source tools to work with it. Reviewers have highlighted that constructing queries in PostgreSQL is straightforward and that it integrates well with all development languages, making migration easy. The flexibility of PostgreSQL's user/role management system has also been praised by users, as it allows for easy control over access to tables.
Wide Industry Adoption and Community Support: Several reviewers acknowledge that PostgreSQL has achieved wide industry adoption, making it easier to integrate into a stack and hire knowledgeable developers. The availability of a huge online community for support was highly appreciated by users. Additionally, many users mentioned the extensive documentation available for PostgreSQL, along with the ease of finding examples, which further contributes to community support.
Complicated Installation and Setup: Many users have found the installation and setup process of PostgreSQL to be complicated, especially for Mac users. They have mentioned the need to learn new commands and have recommended blog posts for guidance.
Difficult Syntax of SQL: Users have expressed difficulty in understanding the syntax of SQL in PostgreSQL, which they find different and hard to grasp. This may be a reason why the software is not widely adopted.
Lack of Clear Benefits: Users have mentioned the lack of clear benefits for choosing PostgreSQL over other products. They feel that there are better alternatives available with more extensive features, documentation, and community support.
Based on user reviews, PostgreSQL is recommended for its ease of use, fast execution, and compatibility with other PostgreSQL users. Users also find its functionality, friendly SQL operations, and good GUI feature beneficial. It is suggested as an alternative to other complex query language platforms.
Reviewers highly recommend PostgreSQL for its scalability, robustness, and reliability. They believe it is the best relational database with great popularity among developers. It is suggested for work, learning, career purposes, as well as small and medium development projects. Users also mention its suitability for incremental development and cost reduction.
PostgreSQL is praised as a world-class and free database with a vibrant community that provides great support. Reviewers recommend it for its cost-effectiveness and suitability as a free relational database. It is suggested as the default database choice for developers, including testing and staging environments. The growing community around PostgreSQL is seen as an advantage.
Other notable recommendations include the speed, security, and reliability of PostgreSQL. It is considered suitable for querying large amounts of data and prioritizing security. Users emphasize the importance of familiarizing oneself with SQL, utilizing the documentation, and keeping up with the latest versions of PostgreSQL. They suggest having database experts on the team for production use.
Additionally, users suggest using PostgreSQL for lightweight installations, optimal database management, building reporting engines, data analysis with good security features at an affordable price, and implementation in systems with array support.
Some users request improvements such as easier configuration processes for Windows users or adding real-time database support or developing another database app. Online resources are recommended for training and support when learning PostgreSQL.
Overall, users find PostgreSQL to be a complete and easily accessible database system with multi-version concurrency support that offers a reliable solution for various needs.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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November 07, 2022
Best Relational and Open Source Database
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Well documentation and it's free
- JSON Support
- It can handle large database
- Real time data
- Security is very good
- Good Interface and easy to work
- Scrolling is not good if you change something on screen you have to reset the screen
- Handling JSON type is not great
- data comparison is not good.
- Easy to set up
- Simple to configure
- Clean and effective UI
- I would appreciate the ability to get performance tuning recommendations
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- 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.
June 22, 2021
PostgreSQL Review
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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!!
- 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!
- 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
- 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
- Ease of use
- No downtime
- Real-time data
- The URL app works much smoother than the locally installed app.
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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!)
- Transaction Speed
- Customized Tuning
- Active/Active High Availability
- PGTune could be more extensive