PostgreSQL
Updated November 19, 2025

PostgreSQL

Ron Ballard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PostgreSQL

I have worked, for 46 years, across multiple industries, charities and public sector organisations using multiple database products. One of the largest databases was recording car movements, received from a tracker every 5 seconds, we had over 2 billion rows in the biggest table and this increased for several more years after I moved on. Our working database was PostgreSQL and the operational system was Netezza, which was built on the PostgreSQL code. We used the geospatial functions to analyse car journeys.The business problems addressed by PostgreSQL include: reliability, performance, productivity, cost, scalability and interoperability across operating systems. PostgreSQL scores highly in all these areas.

Pros

  • PostgreSQL is robust and reliable. I have never known it to crash or to lose data.
  • PostgreSQL performance is amongst the best. Different benchmarks measure different capabilities, and PostgreSQL is consistently in the best performing database systems across all the benchmarks I have seen.
  • PostgreSQL has the best documentation and the most helpful error messages. This optimises productivity, by avoiding lengthy analyses to isolate any problem. (Such problems are usually wrong syntax or illogical processing requests.)
  • PostgreSQL supports some of the largest databases of structured data in the world, including the UKMet Office, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (USA) and the International Space Station, WhitePages.com, OpenStreetMap and many others.
  • PostgreSQL has high conformance to the SQL standard and the relational database theory.

Cons

  • I honestly cannot think of any. I would not want it to support some of the things that are being added to other databases, such as blockchain storage.
  • PostgreSQL is free, so there is no up-front, or ongoing, software cost.
  • PostgreSQL is very efficient in its use of hardware resources. In a recent project the annual cost of hardware to support a PostgreSQL database was about £1,000 per year. In a Microsoft Dataverse, containing exactly the same data, the annual cost for disk usage alone was £100,000. This is not a typo; the Microsoft system cost 100 times as much for disk space as the PostgreSQL system.
  • Because PostgresSQL follows the standards very well, and has good, sensibly indexed, documentation, and provides helpful error messages, our developers ran into fewer problems, and were able to solve problems more quickly.
  • With PostgreSQL, we delivered more at much lower cost.
PostgreSQL is a database management system, so it does needs other tools to build applications, or to provide automated testing, version control, and so on. PostgreSQL does have a procedural language (again more usable than those of other database systems) but this language should be used only for functions tightly coupled with the database. An example might be a Luhn check procedure to check that payment card numbers in the database are valid. As a database management system, PostgreSQL scores 10. PostgreSQL provides the interfaces to use robust application development tools, such as Java, but it does not provide application development tools itself. It should not provide these, and it certainly should not be rated on features outside data management.
In my experience using all of these products over many years, PostgreSQL is better than any of them in reliability, performance, productivity, cost, scalability and interoperability across operating systems.

Do you think PostgreSQL delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with PostgreSQL's feature set?

Yes

Did PostgreSQL live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of PostgreSQL go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy PostgreSQL again?

Yes

Oracle Java SE, Apache Subversion, Cypress.io, DBeaver, LibreOffice, GIMP, Docker, Ubuntu, Crescendo
PostgreSQL is best used for structured data, and best when following relational database design principles. I would not use PostgreSQL for large unstructured data such as video, images, sound files, xml documents, web-pages, especially if these files have their own highly variable, internal structure.

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