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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 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 53)
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Arthur Zubarev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PostgreSQL is the best solution out there for data warehousing for relational data if that is what you need in your various analytics and dashboarding projects. It doesn't work that well as a transactional database, for that you'd probably want to stick with MySQL. The other flavors of PostgreSQL that are optimized may work better again, depending on your specific data types and workflows.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PostgreSQL is great as a data warehousing solution in large organizations but it is also problematic when it is improperly used as a transactional database. Postgres is a OLAP, not an OLTP database where you would use something like MySQL instead for storing live data. It has great read but poor write speeds.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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
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.
Richard Rout | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you're using C# and other products from Microsoft then you get a lot of benefit from Microsoft SQL Server and the Entity Framework ORM. However if you're building an app in almost anything else, then there is almost guaranteed PostgreSQL tooling, utilities or packages for that environment, it's a great database to use.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 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 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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
  • 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
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.
Eric Mann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PostgreSQL is very good for quick projects with structured data. It allows for easy schema development for complex relational structures and also for document storage (using JSON-encoding for documents). The query model against these nested JSON structures is amazing!

If looking for a strict document database, though, PostgreSQL might be overkill when compared to tools like DynamoDB.
Josh Stapp | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It works better if you need JSON support. It's very fast and a little more complicated than MySQL especially with query planning. It's bad on keeping space usage small [for] dump/restore. The whole db shrank out 6TB DB to 2TB. Any large project I would definitely pick postgres just in case more advanced stuff is wanted later.
February 14, 2017

A great RDBMS

Nikhil Karkare | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you want to use it to store your operational data in the records, PostgreSQL will do best. It has a lot of great features. When it comes to analytics and if you have a lot of data (like in billions of rows), it is probably not a good idea. In that case, a columnar database like Vertica or Redshift will do a great job, because they are made for analytics.
Nitin Pasumarthy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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 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
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is well suited for Ruby on Rails applications based on my experience. It made creating a minimum viable product a breeze. The only issue is that it is very comparable to other free solutions without any reason to choose it as a clear winner. If you want to get a web application running quickly, you wouldn't go wrong by choosing it.
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