1. Home
  2. Open-Source Database Software
  3. PostgreSQL Reviews
  4. User Review of PostgreSQL
A Great General Purpose DBMS
June 07, 2019

A Great General Purpose DBMS

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is used throughout our company to power business applications and to drive data-driven decision making. It's mostly used by software development teams as a back-end for data-driven applications. We usually deploy PostgreSQL instances via AWS and connect to them through a PaaS (Platform as a Service) that hosts our applications. Other teams use it for analytical data processing.
  • PostgreSQL is fully featured.
  • Extensible.
  • Has multiple schemas per database.
  • Provides nice SQL syntax.
  • Could provide better documentation of PLPGSQL functions.
  • Developers can quickly and simply set up database instances, allowing them to get to work fast.
  • Database administration is streamlined using the PgAdmin application.
  • The documentation of the DBMS is great, so users can quickly find answers to questions.
PostgreSQL has more features than MySQL, and it has better documentation.
Microsoft SQL Server is more complicated to set up and administer, and its syntax is not as easy to write as PLPGSQL. Moreover, the built-in functions in PostgreSQL are better than what's on offer from MS SQL.
Oracle Database would be the best competitor with PostgreSQL. What it lacks in easy to reference documentation, it makes up for in enterprise support. If you don't need the enterprise support, then PostgreSQL is the way to go.
The main thing that makes PostgreSQL so easy to use is its comprehensive and easily referenced documentation. All it usually only takes is a Web search to find the answer I'm looking for, with examples!
Also, the dialect of SQL that PostgreSQL uses is pretty easy to read and write.
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.