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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

YouTube

ASP.Net Core Web API con Docker Compose, PostgreSQL y EF Core

YouTube

Demo: Replicating Oracle Database to PostgreSQL - TechXperts

YouTube

postgresql conf demo

YouTube
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Product Details

What is PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL Video

What is PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL Integrations

PostgreSQL Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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

(1-7 of 7)
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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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using PostgreSQL as a database for our microservices application. Since microservice is light by nature, performance is never a problem.
We have a lot of microservices applications since PostgreSQL is free, we could use as many database instances as we need without massive cost increase.
The main thing that we like is PostgreSQL supports the JSON column and query which is really useful in our use case.
  • Support the JSON column and able to query by the JSON value.
  • Free to use.
  • Has fairly high performance.
  • Installation and configuration can be difficult for first time users.
  • Somewhat hard to upgrade/update, especially for major releases.
  • Less online documentation and resources available compared to MySQL or SQL Server.
PostgreSQL is perfect if you are an experienced software engineer or database admin. Its wide feature set will be really useful the more you use it. It is also a cheap alternative to SQL Server since you need to pay a fairly pricey SQL Server license especially for business and enterprise, meanwhile, PostgreSQL is completely free to use.
The learning curve is a bit steep compared to MySQL and SQL Server, so might not be suited for a beginner.
Moris Mendez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our department PostgreSQL is used as the main database that supports our transactional systems, reaching a consensus for the use of a single database throughout the organization requires a joint effort that leads to a feasibility study and implementation that determine the best way forward to unify the use of a single database platform.
  • The stability it offers, its speed of response and its resource management is excellent even in complex database environments and with low-resource machines.
  • The large amount of resources it has in addition to the many own and third-party tools that are compatible that make productivity greatly increase.
  • The adaptability in various environments, whether distributed or not, [is a] complete set of configuration options which allows to greatly customize the work configuration according to the needs that are required.
  • The excellent handling of referential and transactional integrity, its internal security scheme, the ease with which we can create backups are some of the strengths that can be mentioned.
  • PostgreSQL installation must be homogeneous across all supported operating systems
  • It would be helpful to have an index of compatible tools, plugins or complementary applications within itself to increase productivity.
  • Regarding the administration of PostgreSQL itself, it would be very helpful to have a dashboard that will show us the insecurities of security, stability and operability in order to have an overview of PostgreSQL behavior.
PostgreSQL is ideal for handling databases that contain large volumes of information due to its efficiency, speed and above all because of the good management it makes of our resources, it also behaves very well in distributed environments of high demand, if you want a database of stable data and excellent performance PostgreSQL is one of the best.
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 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I have used it as a data warehouse, client specific database for a web application, test systems where each developer has their own schema for testing, local application database, and as a remote application database. It has worked well in each of these situations. Currently the main area where I would not use PostgreSQL is when I need an embedded database - in which case I would look at something like SQLite or other.
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.
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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