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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

YouTube

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 Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 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

(26-50 of 52)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PostgreSQL works better than MySQL for analytics workflows where a massively parallel processing database architecture is necessary. We used PostgreSQL because it allows better scalability for querying and data analysis compared to the transactional database MySQL that we use.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PostgreSQL is the proper tool when data consistency matters and other BASE or document-based databases are simply improper. I think PostgreSQL has a fantastic system of slony replication, triggers, and other data maintenance functionality that other databases generally don't have. The themes of postgres are also varied, but postgres was selected because of it's massively parallel processing functionality and data consistency.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PostgreSQL has more features than MySQL, and it has better documentation.
Microsoft SQL Server is more complicated to set up and administer, and its syntax is not as easy to write as PLPGSQL. Moreover, the built-in functions in PostgreSQL are better than what's on offer from MS SQL.
Oracle Database would be the best competitor with PostgreSQL. What it lacks in easy to reference documentation, it makes up for in enterprise support. If you don't need the enterprise support, then PostgreSQL is the way to go.
Jacob Biguvu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MySQL is also an open-source relational database management system. Both support ACID requirements, Full-text-search. Both are available for Cloud solutions. However, I would recommend PostgreSQL.
Aaron Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PostgreSQL is very similar to both MySQL and Microsoft's SQL Server. With no licensing costs, it's clearly a win against SQL Server, plus it can be run on either Linux or Windows. MySQL and PostgreSQL also have many similarities, however, PostgreSQL offers many more options for clustering and scalability.
Richard Rout | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
They each have their pros and cons. MySQL is probably the other popular "free" alternative in this space, but it's not as popular or have as much community support as PostgreSQL.
Microsoft SQL Server is amazing in the microsoft tech stack, but it's pretty useless and provides little benefit over postgres if you're developing outside of the Microsoft tech stack.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MySQL is a popular open-source alternative to PostgreSQL, but in my experience it lacks the robustness, durability, and flexibility of PostgreSQL. It has also changed hands frequently, so support isn't the greatest. MongoDB and other NoSQL databases are helpful in certain programming environments and for certain use cases, but sometimes you just need a really robust relational database.
Carlos Alberto Pedron Espinett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Despite being all open source options, what ended up making us choose PostgreSQL was the robustness of its core, which allows the great workflow that can support timely and efficient response to the demand and demand for resources. In the case of MongoDB, it is a non-relational handler, and the other options showed a lower performance than that offered by PostgreSQL.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For one thing, PostgreSQL is open source: which means that 1.) a million eyes catches more issues than a thousand (or TEN thousand) eyes. and 2.) there are no complicated licensing structures to fight through
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used MS SQL and MySQL. Microsoft SQL Server is a good option for small applications in the commercial space. PostgreSQL can be more compared with Oracle in the feature set.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The features between these database are quite comparable - except for possibly MongoDB. MongoDB being a different type of database and geared towards big data - I don't compare it to PostgreSQL. The other two I have used and would say PostgreSQL does fairly well when compared with them. Again, the feature set being similar and the cost $0 does give PostgreSQL an advantage. Unless I have a specific integration need for Oracle or MSQL - I will generally always consider PostgreSQL.
Anatoly Geyfman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We evaluated MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL Server and a few other hosted options. We loved the fact that PG is both a GIS system and a traditional RDBMS. The mindshare around PG is high -- thousands of answers on StackOverflow, very active developer community and a punctual release schedule. PG is a standout open source product.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I found PostgreSQL to be better compared to MySQL. The community support is very good. Some features that I feel are not present in MySQL are:
  • No referential integrity.
  • No constraints (CHECK).
  • No sort merge join, let alone hash-join.
  • Generally poor at analytical workloads, since it's designed for transactional workloads.
  • No group commit
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As mentioned previously, I came from primarily a MySQL background. I had used other databases such as SQL Server and Oracle, but MySQL is what I used most of the time for my RDBMS needs before switching to PostgreSQL. MySQL/MariaDB certainly have some great strengths, but I feel that they sacrifice features for simplicity. A lot of those sacrificed features are built into PostgreSQL or only an extension away, and they can relieve a ton of pressure on your application layer.
Eric Mann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PostgreSQL provides both the traditional relational DB setup of MySQL and a more document-driven model like that of DynamoDB. As some of our data is relational and some is document-based, it was more efficient to select the tool that did both than run two, separate databases. PostgreSQL offers all of the features we need.
Josh Stapp | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Postgres had faster data retrieval for larger amounts than MySQL. The child tables have been a blessing and a curse at times but postgres seems to have a lot more detail about what is going on than MySQL with all of its user/pg/index tables and query planning. There is obviously an enormous amount of information around any SQL based DB.
February 14, 2017

A great RDBMS

Nikhil Karkare | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I found PostgreSQL better than MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server but Redshift steals the show as I am a BI guy who sees everything from an analytics point of view. PostgreSQL is great if you have less data for analytics or if you are using it to store the operational data.
Nitin Pasumarthy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Compared to MySQL, it works well if you need to extend to your use case
Compared to Spark, it works better w.r.t development time in a central database setting
Like Redis, it cannot be used for caching and quick access of non-structured data
Christopher Weiss | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PostgreSQL lacks the scalability of a commercial database such as SQL Server or Oracle. For this reason, it has been a difficult sale for some customers. However, PostgreSQL has more features, including a better programming language than MySQL. It is much more feature rich than embedded databases such as Berkeley DB and SQLLite, which have very limited applications.
David McCann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  1. MySQL - doesn't have transactional support for schema migrations, and has a more restrictive license
  2. DB2 - not free
  3. SQLite - doesn't have full foreign key constraint support
  4. CouchDB - slightly different use case, however PostgreSQL does offer performant to_json functionality that overlaps with this attractive CouchDB capability
Overall, PostgreSQL is the best default choice for any database-driven web application with a fairly common set of requirements.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As I said, Postgres and MySQL are open source which is important for small start ups. Oracle is EXPENSIVE :)
Postgres is faster than MySQL (Big factor)
MySQL supports replication which makes it more scalable.
In short, if you are a small company just starting, Postgres would be a very good option for you to go with.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I am currently using MySQL and it is difficult to notice much of a difference at all. For free relational databases, there hasn't been enough for me to choose a clear winner. If you're already using a free solution, there would be no reason to change. In terms of comparing to a NoSQL solution, there is too stark of a difference to really compare. For me, in this realm, it's best to go with what you know and not waste time splitting hairs.
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