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PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

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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Professional and Free

8 out of 10
May 14, 2021
Incentivized
PostgreSQL open source relational data management system takes on a task behind a critical and important application running in our …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Product Demos

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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Product Details

What is PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL Video

What is PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL Integrations

PostgreSQL Technical Details

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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 Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(322)

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!

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

(1-25 of 27)
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vijay bhopalwani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
PostgreSQL is an Open Source Database that is used for mainly Relational database Systems. We are mainly using this database because of the microservice structure. And in microservices, we have a lot of databases and also it's open source so that is good for our organization. And it's an object-relational database the performance of the database is pretty good.
  • 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.
Using PostgreSQL is a Very great experience it's very simple to use and PostgreSQL easily handles large datasets. and if you looking for a relational database management system PostgreSQL is great because the cost is very low compared to other databases. And the large queries speedily run and if you are stuck somewhere the documentation is great.
Aurpa Fiza | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
PostgreSQL, unlike other databases, is user-friendly and uses an open-source database. Ideal for relational databases, they can be accessed when speed and efficiency are required. It enables high-availability and disaster recovery replication from instance to instance. PostgreSQL can store data in a JSON format, including hashes, keys, and values. Multi-platform compatibility is also a big selling point. We could, however, use all the DBMS’s cores. While it works well in fast environments, it can be problematic in slower ones or cause multiple master replication.
Erlon Sousa Pinheiro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I simply can't see any reason to use another object-relational database (other than licensing of compatibility with legacy applications) instead of PostgreSQL. I can surely affirm PostgreSQL is the most powerful, scalable, and reliable open-source object-relational database ever. Being able to handle a huge amount of data safely, PostgreSQL will offer you a final result many other paid options can't.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
PostgreSQL is a phenomenal product that can satisfy most relational data needs. If you are in an environment where cost is a factor, or you are just starting with a project and needs to get up and running quickly, then PostgreSQL should be your go-to choice. It is robust, reliable, and has all the features you would need from a SQL compliant database, without all the additional baggage that comes with other more heavyweight alternatives.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Looking at many criteria such as the number of transactions, data type diversity, data size and application types to run in the front and concurrent use, PostgreSQL relational database is very suitable for medium and large projects. There are simpler applications for small projects.
Mark Mitchell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
PostgreSQL is well suited for almost all industries and use case such as fInance, government, web apps, and even as a "NoSQL" document store with its JSONB/JSON and hstore capability. Its focus on ACID compliance makes it a trustworthy data store. It's a great central database with its ability to use external data sources and its ability to handle large workloads. Its ability to handle petabytes of data make it ideal for scientific and discovery workloads as well as AI neural networks. With PostgreSQL there is always a way to structure your data to make it fast and reliable.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
Being an Open Source solution PostgreSQL is great choice for solutions that needs database and do not want to relay on customer database solutions.
PostgreSQL can easily integrated with many platforms we access the database from both our solution engines and the UI.
It is well known and appreciated so relaying on it as our system database can be easily accepted by our customers.
PostgreSQL continues development and support allows us to provide secure and reliable solution acceptable by customer security teams and advisors.
Vladimir Salnikov | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
In my humble opinion, the best area to use PostgreSQL - is small and medium databases with several billion or tens of billions of records/entities with some spatial attributes analytics involved in the data processing pipeline, if needed. Using PostgreSQL with the conjunction of PostGIS extension and some other open-source software such as QuantumGIS, Leaflet, etc allows users rapidly create spatial data analytics software, maintain and modify it with few resources spend.
Javier Blanque | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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).
PostgreSQL is open source, and then, there are several companies that could give you technical support, like EnterpriseDB or Percona.
PostgreSQL is easy to install and configure and is multi-platform, you could use Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, and you could use ALL the hardware you have purchased for your project, without sinking hundreds of thousand of dollars in proprietary software, to use only a small part of your server for the database.
Let's see a concrete case: You have a project to make an information system which uses an underlying database. Then you purchase 3 servers, which cost USD 50K for the Production server, USD 25K for the Contingency Server and USD 10K for the Development Server.
If you use a proprietary database, we know what companies, they price their software licenses per every 2 cores if we use the servers physically or every 2 vcpus (threads) if we use virtual machines, and the cost range is between USD 15K and 50K for each 2 cores license. If my production server has a configuration of 24 SSDs of 3,84 TB, 2 TB of ECC RAM, and 2 CPUs AMD EPYC 7702, with 64 cores each (128 cores and 256 vcpus or threads per server), the cost of the proprietary database could be more than USD one million, and if we use a subscription mechanism to get the updates, we could be talking of another million each 3 to 5 years. That is ten times the cost of the hardware. And you can TOUCH the hardware.
Is PostgreSQL slower than the proprietary databases that we talk about? Yes; but for what margin? In in-house tests, the performance of PostgreSQL was from 50% to 75% typically, with several scenarios where PostgreSQL where speedier. But we could use ALL the cores for the DBMS, not just a few.
For us PostgreSQL is the best database in existence. Period. If we use proprietary databases yet it's only for legacy information systems, for contractual restrictions or because our providers haven't seen the light (yet).
Arthur Zubarev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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
PostgreSQL is a go-to database for any web application, especially if one is going to reside with one of the many hosting/Cloud providers. It can analyze some, up to a few TBs, of transactional data, or can be used in data warehouses, and extending it - Geospatial, JSON, Failover, Replication are all within reach.

Not so great for ETL or large volume data processing, e.g. pulling data from foreign sources is not easy often. It is slow to read so any large table scans would be detrimental speed-wise or noticeable to end-users. No in-memory storage, so not good as cache.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
PostgreSQL is really good at being a data source for many applications. Because each database has the ability to have multiple schemas, a database can be separated logically according to criteria, such as which business unit the underlying data belongs to. Then, within that database, multiple schemas can be created for different purposes -- maybe one schema per application.
This setup of the DBMS is great for a more monolithic data source, but not so much for a more micro-service style setup.
Jacob Biguvu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
PostgreSQL is best for OLTP applications and searches engines/queries. Want to save the budget? PostgreSQL is best. Want database support on On-premises and Cloud? PostgreSQL is best.

For the non-critical applications, I would recommend using PostgreSQL. For critical applications, I would recommend going through the database design, modeling, and architectural decision-making process. Proper design decisions mitigate many performance issues.
Aaron Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
PostgreSQL is great for all types of data storage needs. Even if you have a use case for minor document storage, it can handle it. As with most things, you use the right tool for the job, anywhere you would use MySQL or SQL Server, you can just swap in PostgreSQL. However, if you are needing a NoSQL or schema-less storage model, look elsewhere.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
One thing that I/my companies use it for and that it is most frequently used for is applications with some sort of API. Storage and retrieval is very fast and performant, and the data types (including JSON natively) bring together the best aspects of traditional SQL databases and newer NoSQL databases (ie. MongoDB and others)
Carlos Alberto Pedron Espinett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
PostgreSQL is indicated for companies with a large database that requires the maximum database manager and needs to squeeze all its benefits. It is not recommended for use in small databases or ones with a low level of transactions, many of which will be lost. Those are benefits of this application, and there are options that can provide better results.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
The use case I am using it for - I have recommended to several entities: it's a good way to quickly get information out of an MBOX file format (which contains a lot of unstructured data).
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
1. Open source and object relational
2. Great community
3. New versions for every six months and very stable
4. Support for JSON, XML and Geospatial
Anatoly Geyfman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Postgres is best suited as an OLTP database, and even for non-huge OLAP use cases. We especially love the third-party extensions to PG that make the database a clear winner amongst open source databases. When evaluating PG, look beyond traditional RDBMS workloads and also into areas where NOSQL databases have use cases. With PG's support for the JSON and JSONB data types, PG is now a competitor on the schema-less database space.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • Postgres is starting to support parallel (multi-core) queries in 9.6
  • Postgres supports materialized views
  • PostgreSQL has better/consistent interface when working with date/times
  • Has very good tooling - PostgreSQL pgAdmin IV
  • It supports all sorts of performance optimisation that you're used to from Oracle, SQL Server.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
PostgreSQL has handled every workload I've handed to it quite well. With proper table structuring and indexing, it handles OLTP and OLAP workloads very well. PostgreSQL is also great at isolating data if you need to ensure that one user cannot access another user's information. Row-level access controls in PostgreSQL are fantastic.
Nitin Pasumarthy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Good if we want to extend the database and use existing plugins
Good for research and academic use cases like learning database internals
Not good in places where customer support is mandatory for enterprise (as far as I know)
Not good in cases where distributed system is required for availability as there are other better distributed database systems
Christopher Weiss | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
For a general purpose SQL database that is fully SQL 92 compliant, PostgreSQL is a feature rich open source database. It is underrated in this area and frequently passed over in favor of MySQL or MariaDB. PostgreSQL is more akin to SQL Server or Oracle than it is to MySQL. For general purpose applications that need some database side programming, PostgreSQL is an excellent choice.

If you need a lighter weight and trivial to configure database, MySQL is a better choice. Also, PostgreSQL sometimes is not as performant as other solutions, meaning scale and load can be issues.
David McCann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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).
PostgreSQL is in my opinion the best open-source option for any enterprise-level product requiring a standard relational database. Areas where it might be considered not ideal would include: smaller-scale projects requiring a database (MySQL might be an alternative here), or document stores with unstructured data (some would argue that NoSQL options are better here).
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
  • Lack of replication but I think that's been fixed in Postgres recently. Still MySQL has better replication mechanisms.
  • MySQL has more documentation and community support
It works very well as a relational database. I think it's much better that MySQL. It supports a lot of advanced features. Also, all advanced data types are supported.
Avoid Postgres if replication is important for you. I think MySQL scores over Postgres in that regard. Both have pretty decent community and user group but I think Postgres is still behind MySQL. Could be a a little hard to find answers to uncommon questions.
Ojoswi Basu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PostGre SQL is the relational data source for our Tableau Data. It holds data ETL-ed from MQ Listener via SSIS. This application houses all the patient and long term care facility details in a normalized relation data model. Tableau connects to Postgres and joins/massages the data to produce business consumable reports.
  • Edit data after View
  • Instantaneous access and update for Tableau extracts hooked to this data source
  • Simple syntax for DDL
Postgre SQL is well suited well in a POC and quick turn around time development activities. It is not suited to hold a dimensional data model in star or snowflake schema.

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