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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 …
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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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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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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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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.
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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
August 02, 2019
PostgreSQL - Data Warehousing Technology
PostgreSQL is being used as the main data warehousing system by our organization for various analytics functions. It is being used across our whole organization both internally and externally to generate reports and other dashboards products. The business problems it addresses is the need to run complex analytics queries without having too much time be burned up by running the query on MySQL.
- Data warehousing
- Analytics
- Slony replication
- Query language consistency
- In-memory caching is needed
- Better query optimization
PostgreSQL on Greenplum is being used as a data warehouse by the entire data and analytics team on my project. There are also other teams using the database as well, but it solves the business problems of running large analytics workflows with billions of rows of archived data to create reporting dashboards. It is able to run in a massively parallel processing format.
- data processing
- big data analytics
- data aggregation
- SQL syntax support
- query error handling
- programmatic access
June 07, 2019
A Great General Purpose DBMS
PostgreSQL is used throughout our company to power business applications and to drive data-driven decision making. It's mostly used by software development teams as a back-end for data-driven applications. We usually deploy PostgreSQL instances via AWS and connect to them through a PaaS (Platform as a Service) that hosts our applications. Other teams use it for analytical data processing.
- PostgreSQL is fully featured.
- Extensible.
- Has multiple schemas per database.
- Provides nice SQL syntax.
- Could provide better documentation of PLPGSQL functions.
June 05, 2019
PostgreSQL - open-source, flexible and futuristic
Capital One has many LOBs (line of businesses). I have supported IAM and Commercial
LOB. They are using PostgreSQL as an OLTP database solution. Company is using Oracle, SQL Server as OLTP solution for the most of their requirements. Since everyone moving to Cloud and want to use the open-source solutions, the company encourages the IT teams to use PostgreSQL.
- Open-source. No license issues like Oracle and SQL server.
- Full SQL Compliance.
- GIS extension for search engines or queries.
- Extensions/plugins to be used for on-premises and cloud technologies.
- Easy installation/configuration.
- Performance optimization is needed for the database as well as SQL.
January 18, 2019
PostgreSQL is making a comeback!
After using Microsoft's SQL Server for many years for our application's back end data storage, we made the switch to PostgreSQL for all new application development. For our use case, PostgreSQL has the same feature set SQL Server has and comparable performance. We needed a way to have multiple server clusters for redundancy and licensing costs of SQL Server were starting to get prohibitive. PostgreSQL gives us a stable and more cost-effective solution for data storage.
- Redundancy and clustering can be handled in multiple different ways, offering complete control over specific use cases.
- GIS extension for spatial data.
- Full SQL compliance.
- A little lighter on resources than SQL Server.
- The documentation can be sometimes lacking, however, there are lots of online resources for troubleshooting.
- The tooling could be better. If you're used to SQL Server Management Studio and all the 3rd party add-ons, moving to PostgreSQL can be hard to get used to at first.
- If you are on a version older than 11, you cannot use Transactions in Stored Procedures. While this isn't an issue moving forward, not all cloud providers support version 11 yet.
October 18, 2018
An amazing free option for an enterprise level database tool
We use PostgreSQL as our database backend on the majority of our applications across the whole organization. It solves all of the problems that a relational database would solve. It's a very similar product to MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server and supports a very similar query syntax to both of those.
- Free relational SQL based database
- Tonnes of community support
- Fast, scalable database.
- Hard learning curve if you are unfamiliar with SQL databases
- The graphical tooling isn't as good as some of the tools provided by Microsoft for the example.
- Can be hard to figure out what went wrong unless you know how.
October 18, 2018
Robust, resiliant, performant - ready for enterprise work!
I personally have used PostgreSQL for several personal projects. I've also used PostgreSQL in previous roles at other companies. In my current role, I mainly rely on APIs and other systems built on PostgreSQL. In all instances, PostgreSQL was chosen because of its performance and versatility. Also a consideration was its longevity and market penetration - this product has been around for a long time and is well used in the industry.
- Flexible data types
- Very efficient and performant I/O
- Robust table relationship mapping (ie. primary keys, sequences, etc.)
- Better official documentation
- Better official GUI - the current main option (PgAdmin III) is pretty terrible, especially on Mac.
PostgreSQL emerged as a robust option for a re-engineering process that consisted of migrating our business platform from Microsoft SQL server to PostgreSQL. The following were determining factors in our selection: the migration from Borland Delphi to PHP, the ability work in web environments in the frontend of the company, and the product's versatility and ability to adapt to content growth.
- The genetic algorithm that is part of the PostgreSQL core allows the manager to take the most efficient route for the realization of certain queries, which offers superior performance to the options presented as their competitors.
- The possibility of limiting the simultaneous connections that the manager receives allows us to channel their resources efficiently and optimally.
- PostgreSQL allows adding additional languages ​​to Transact-SQL itself to perform its functions or procedures. This is important since it allows teamwork without major limitations to the knowledge of the language being worked, and its availability as an extension for PostgreSQL.
- In short or quick queries, PostgreSQL usually shows disadvantages compared to other, similar applications.
- The knowledge or management of commands by console is desirable. That is to say, it would be better to avoid depending on the graphical interface for the manager to be able to operate it correctly, since the pgAdmin option that this proposes usually consumes a lot of computer resources.
- While it isn't quite bad, the documentation regarding the handler could improve. The current one is usually sufficient, but could improve.
Currently, PostgreSQL is being used as an email texting mining tool, where I load a flat file email archive into postgresql and then auto-generate keys, which I can then use to find certain keywords.
- PostgreSQL's file size is a plus: the fact that installing it on both a Windows and Linux system is easy and fast (even on a moderate connection) is helpful from an admin perspective.
- Going off of that, it's very quick! It loads and creates tables quickly and provides a very similar interface to other implementations of SQL.
- Using it as an Email Search system is unconventional (just a tad), but makes for a great back-end when you need to test-deploy a concept.
- Its operations syntax is not like any other implementation, which means that along with installing it, you will need to pick up on how to create tables, etc.
- In connection with the above point, attempting to essentially re-learn a set of commands is NOT a good idea. Especially since SQL has been around a long time at this point.
- Which I think is why it's not widely adopted (in my opinion): Its syntax is very different (and obtuse). Plus, implementations such as SQlLite3 have beaten Post to the punch in the mobile market.
PostgreSQL is a good alternative in the open source database world. We were looking for an open source, reliable database for one of our products and selected PostgreSQL over MySQL due to its rich features. We used it as a transaction database.it has server side programming languages such as PL/Pg-SQL and have options to write functions in Python, Perl , Java, Ruby, C and R. With its latest releases it has support for JSON and is the only open source database with Geo spatial support.
- Object relational database
- Rich support of procedural languages like R, C, Python, Perl and PL/ PGSQL
- Geo Spatial and JSON support
- MVCC concurrency model gives less locking
- Deployment gets difficult for folks who are habituated with commercial databases.
- We cannot write our own database engine unlike MySQL.
- PostgreSQL do not allow us to execute batch of statement. we have to embed it in a function to achieve this.
September 28, 2017
From Oracle Database to PostgreSQL
We use PostgreSQL as our main database platform, for our cloud solutions, GIS applications and all new products. We used Oracle Database for many years before, but it is now only a bad memory, from high costs to low quality resources. PostgreSQL is superior, more simple but robust and a complete database solution.
- No license cost
- Full integration with all development languages (C#, Java, Node.js, etc.)
- Easy migration
- Full documentation
- Fantastic addons, like PostGIS
- Few IDEs
September 18, 2017
PostgreSQL - A great database at a great price.
In my previous and current organisation we develop applications using PostgreSQL as one of or the database of choice to store application data. I have used it in both client-server implementations where it is used to store data for a single company as well as in cloud implementations where it is used to store data across many companies and users. Recently I have used it as the database in a data warehouse solution, data mining millions of rows.
- The biggest reason I have used postgreSQL and continue to use it in places where I work - is the cost. There is none. It is a great feature rich database which doesn't cost you anything.
- When using properly design database, tables, and relationships - we have not ran into any particular database limit
- For my uses I have none. Currently we are developing a new application using the lastest version of PostgreSQL and are exploring any limitations.
We use Postgres for both OLAP and OLTP use cases. We use it as our data warehouse, for interactive queries, and for storing application data. Postgres is one of our main data warehouses, and we use it in congress with BigQuery to store, analyze and finally index data into our ElasticSearch cluster. One of our primary uses of Postgres is for geospatial analytics, so we leverage the PostGIS extension extensively.
- Spatial Analytics and other GIS use cases - PostGIS is an excellent way to get into spatial analytics, loading it up with data is trivial, power is on par with commercial solutions.
- Interactive queries over large (but not huge datasets) - easy to load data, query it with standard SQL, easy to set up and maintain.
- Support for a variety of data types - storing data in the database using semantic types is helpful for deeper analysis.
- Clustering -- we'd love to see clustering built into the product itself instead of third-party
- Parallelization -- PG is already going in this direction, but it will take a few more releases to be there
- Tooling -- we use a third-party tool right now to query PG, would love to see a first-party quality query tool
April 28, 2017
PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS
PostgreSQL is used organization wide. We are a very federated organization and each team maintains its own instances of PostgreSQL. We use it through Amazon RDS. PostgreSQL is used to maintain transactional data about our acquisition customers and for AML.
- PostgreSQL is good for transactional forms of data. Better support than the proprietary vendors RDBMS and is very reliable. You can query data like in any other RDBMS. It also provides Java and JS drives for connecting to your application and querying.
- If you are using Amazon RDS then Postgres is available as an option with Amazon for managing your instances. So that is very convenient.
- It is the most advanced, SQL-compliant and open-source objective-RDBMS. It is very reliable for relational data as well as storing blobs of JSON in its tables.
- One drawback that I have personally experienced is that it is a bit harder to get community support or to Google for results. However, with more use of PostgresSQL the community support is getting better.
March 27, 2017
Trusty database for years
We use PostgreSQL as a central location for relational data. Almost all of our applications tie into PostgreSQL in one way or another. We also use PostgreSQL as a data warehouse and analytics engine for several hundred gigabytes of data. That figure continues to rise rapidly, and PostgreSQL is handling the load perfectly well.
- Correctness. Before using PostgreSQL, most of my relational database experience was with MySQL. I originally chose to work with MySQL because it seemed easier to setup than PostgreSQL. There were a lot of things I loved about MySQL--choice of engines, speed, simplicity. What I did not like, though, was that the default behavior of truncating data if it exceeded the size of a varchar field, for example. Definitely not a hard problem to solve, but as a default it drove me nuts. PostgreSQL does the right thing in this case and in so many others where MySQL had strange defaults. (MySQL may have improved in the years since I last used it.)
- Flexibility. PostgreSQL makes it easy to add new functionality through custom extensions. The custom functionality can be as simple as a helper function, or it can be as complex as changing the way data is assigned to various nodes in a cluster. Very powerful feature.
- Features. PostgreSQL has a ton of awesome features built in. One of my favorite features is native support for useful data types such as JSON/JSONB (including the ability to query and create indexes on deeply nested values).
- Clustering/sharding/replication. PostgreSQL has definitely made great progress in the replication area in recent years. Upcoming releases are going to handle more of the clustering/sharding pain points better from what I've read. Right now... it's just not terribly fantastic.
- Really, most of my gripes with PostgreSQL have to do with managing a cluster of servers.
- We have extensions such as Citus, but it would be great for that stuff to be built into PostgreSQL. And still have the ability to manage clustering a different way using custom extensions.
March 21, 2017
The best of both Relational and Document DB paradigms
We use PostgreSQL across the organization for data storage across multiple web-based microservices. It's easily scalable, hosted on AWS, and provides deeper features we need when querying against complex data types (namely against JSON).
- Native JSON support
- Intuitive command line integration
- Easy Docker hosting
- Shared extensions. We use the pgcrypto extension (for UUID support) and frequently install it to the wrong schema by mistake. Extensions are difficult to move, and this is an easy mistake to make.
- Clearer delineation between "databases" and "schemas" would help to better understand the system.
March 15, 2017
PostgreSQL is great for storing large amounts of data
It is being used to store 5TB of advertising data for our web app. It has a very fast response time and the JSON support is a nice feature. Since we already know SQL learning it has been easy and the index/pg tables contain a lot of helpful information for us to use.
- Speed
- JSON support
- Widely used
- Autovacuum problems
- JSON speed
- Doesn't clean up indexes well
February 14, 2017
A great RDBMS
We are using PostgreSQL for our business intelligence and analytics purposes. We are using it to store the integrated data from the multiple data sources. In short, we are using it to store our data warehouse. We pull the data from here to create the reports in our reporting tool.
- I like the pre-defined functions of PostgreSQL.
- It has got some advanced data types which are not available in many other relational database systems.
- It is reliable and we can write the stored procedures in Python, which is a great feature.
- It is probably one of the best relational database systems but I find it not good enough for analytics purposes (not bad if you have less data).
- I haven't done its configuration but I came to know that this is not really easy as in the other RDMS tools.
- It doesn't have the proper documentation, considering it has a lot of features.
November 08, 2016
Worry Free
In my current environment we are using PostgreSQL as a backend database for our online billing system. It sits on our web server and has not much overhead.
- It is simple to use, no overheads.
- It has a simple GUI as opposed to other opensource databases
- Its free to use.
- PostgreSQL needs to improve upon its storage engine.
November 03, 2016
PostgreSQL, the best research oriented central database
I used PostgresSQL as a GeoSpatial database for creating map server. For that I installed PostGis plugin which provides GeoSpatial functions which are useful for creating map tiles from vector data. A detailed description of what all I did with Postgres in this project can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/nitinpasumarthy/blog/createyourowntileserverandmapclient under sections 2 and 3 ("Process Data" & "Create tiles from Postgres").
- Relational database with great collection of GeoSpatial functions
- Open source which enables researchers to tweak and extend
- Good resource for learning internals of a database like Query Optimizer, Buffer Manager etc.
- Installation can be a little tricky sometimes. Wrote a decent blog post how to do it on a MAC - https://sites.google.com/site/nitinpasumarthy/blog/installingpostgresonmac
October 26, 2016
PostgreSQL is too often overlooked
We have used PostgreSQL as an application database for PHP, Ruby, and Java based applications. It has been used primarily for our customers' internet facing application. PostgreSQL presents a feature-rich open source database with many of the same capabilities as enterprise databases.
PostgreSQL presents a better stored procedure language as well as having better integration for geo spatial capabilities than MySQL. For setup and administration it is more flexible than SQL Server or Oracle.
In general, PostgreSQL tends to be overlooked.
PostgreSQL presents a better stored procedure language as well as having better integration for geo spatial capabilities than MySQL. For setup and administration it is more flexible than SQL Server or Oracle.
In general, PostgreSQL tends to be overlooked.
- The backend stored procedure language is complete, and lends itself to better programming and data manipulation tasks than MySQL.
- PostgreSQL has complex data types like object columns and record data types that allow it to better mirror object relational structures directly within tables.
- It is a fully SQL 92 compliant database even in its fully open source version.
- For some more advanced features like replication, PostgreSQL can be a pain.
- PostgreSQL can experience some bottlenecks under heavy read query load.
- An in-memory or similar transaction caching strategy could greatly expand the appeal of PostgreSQL as developers look for other solutions such as Reddis to do in memory processing.
August 02, 2016
PostgreSQL - the last database you'll ever need
PostgreSQL serves as the database for our web-based product. As such it is used by the entire organization and is an integral part of the product.
- Broad array of custom functionality/formulae built atop standard SQL statements
- Transactional support for schema migrations
- Great low-level performance tuning capabilities
- Performant implementation of bulk merge (upsert)
- Some of the custom SQL functions thatPostgreSQL provides could be optimized. Specifically I've seen that the "is contained within" operator for inet columns is slow to the point of being unusable in bulk (e.g. as a join criteria).
August 01, 2016
Postgres - A blessing for small businesses
We use Postgres for our core product - a SaaS application. We have around 200 users and a lot of backend processes that use PostgreSQL.
- Postgres is open source and works very well with Django (web framework written in Python) that we use.
- Postgres has significant performance improvements over MySQL and other relational databases
- Postgres supports storing JSON which makes retrieval easy
July 13, 2016
PostgreSQL - does it differentiate?
PostgreSQL was used when prototyping a new website for Ruby on Rails. It meshed seamlessly and allowed us to iterate quickly for our minimum viable product. We deployed on a Heroku server and there was no issue with getting it to work. It's comparable to the other free SQL solutions on the market, but it was great for us in this case.
- It is easy to understand and integrate
- It is a very well maintained piece of software
- It is easy to switch into PostgreSQL from other SQL implementations
- It still is not quite as fast as the paid solutions
- There is stiff competition from other free solutions
- They don't spell out clear benefits for choosing the product