PostgreSQL is making a comeback!
January 18, 2019
PostgreSQL is making a comeback!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with PostgreSQL
After using Microsoft's SQL Server for many years for our application's back end data storage, we made the switch to PostgreSQL for all new application development. For our use case, PostgreSQL has the same feature set SQL Server has and comparable performance. We needed a way to have multiple server clusters for redundancy and licensing costs of SQL Server were starting to get prohibitive. PostgreSQL gives us a stable and more cost-effective solution for data storage.
- Redundancy and clustering can be handled in multiple different ways, offering complete control over specific use cases.
- GIS extension for spatial data.
- Full SQL compliance.
- A little lighter on resources than SQL Server.
- The documentation can be sometimes lacking, however, there are lots of online resources for troubleshooting.
- The tooling could be better. If you're used to SQL Server Management Studio and all the 3rd party add-ons, moving to PostgreSQL can be hard to get used to at first.
- If you are on a version older than 11, you cannot use Transactions in Stored Procedures. While this isn't an issue moving forward, not all cloud providers support version 11 yet.
- No licensing costs mean cheaper development costs as well as cheaper production environments.
- Lots of resources on best practices and similarities to other RDBMS means that switching was fast and easy.
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.