Robust and Somewhat Daunting But Worth the Effort
May 17, 2017
Robust and Somewhat Daunting But Worth the Effort
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Postgres Plus Advanced Server
We built a software service for online education providing metadata about courses offered ranging from MOOCs to private vendors. This entire service architecture ran on a PostgreSQL backend which required monitoring, optimization, replication, and other features to maintain service level agreements with the consumers of our service, which was intended for web and mobile clients. We used Apache Solr integrated with the PostgreSQL back end and needed advanced monitoring and optimization to ensure blazing fast searches. Postgres Plus Advanced Server gave us the suite of tools we needed including the ability to easily hook in from the client language of our choice as well as manage, optimize and maintain the utmost security in our database platform.
- Developer tools including debugging, JSON and XML support, libraries for preferred languages and good examples all facilitated integration and development. Robust features for developers.
- Security is top notch and supports far beyond what we required for our project, which is a good thing.
- Performance, throttling, monitoring and optimization are all top notch and helped us keep response times low and save on bandwidth and hosting costs.
- Documentation is excellent but spread out across many resources and can take a while to wade through—would benefit from having more intro level, getting started guides for various languages.
- Ruby support is excellent but more Ruby examples and beginner-level documentation would be nice.
- It is sometimes hard to find a community of users on StackOverflow so a larger community, and a dedicated forum with active members to answer questions and work through issues would be nice.
- Postgres Plus Advanced Server is quite complex and may take longer to implement certain things than simply using PostgreSQL depending on developer familiarity with the platform.
- Getting up to speed can be daunting so again, there is an upfront cost in time spent learning the platform, besides the potential for extra time spent on a feature-by-feature basis.
- The cost of Postgres Plus Advanced Server should be weighed against simply using PostgreSQL to decide which is the best solution for your business needs.
We chose Postgres Plus Advanced Server because we had the finances to do so and needed the robust featureset, along with the power to optimize our performance and integrate with the development tools of our choosing. We audited a number of options, exploring potential solutions at various levels of robustness and decided that this was our best option moving forward.