PostgreSQL, the best research oriented central database
Updated November 03, 2016

PostgreSQL, the best research oriented central database

Nitin Pasumarthy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PostgreSQL

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
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
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