Item: PostgreSQL
Rating: 8
Author: Nikhil Karkare

Overall Satisfaction with PostgreSQL

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using PostgreSQL for our business intelligence and analytics purposes. We are using it to store the integrated data from the multiple data sources. In short, we are using it to store our data warehouse. We pull the data from here to create the reports in our reporting tool.

Pros and Cons

Pros

I like the pre-defined functions of PostgreSQL.
It has got some advanced data types which are not available in many other relational database systems.
It is reliable and we can write the stored procedures in Python, which is a great feature.

Cons

It is probably one of the best relational database systems but I find it not good enough for analytics purposes (not bad if you have less data).
I haven't done its configuration but I came to know that this is not really easy as in the other RDMS tools.
It doesn't have the proper documentation, considering it has a lot of features.

Return on Investment

I can't think of any negative impacts. The query processing becomes slow if you are pulling the data from any relational database systems, not just PostgreSQL.
We don't have a lot of data (no big data), so it is doing a good job for us processing the reports within seconds.
It has some good security features as well.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Redshift, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server

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.

Other Software Used

Pentaho, MySQL

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

A great RDBMS