PostgreSQL Reviews

We use it as a backend for some vendor-supplied tools and products. We also do a certain amount of software development, and we use it as the database platform behind our own software.

We have a number of deployments, and the version number very much depends on the vendor software requirements. We have on-premises and cloud deployments.

It is a pretty comprehensive database system. Its performance is good, and it does what it is supposed to do. It also integrates very well.

There are some products out there that have a slightly different method of implementation for the SQL language. Some of those are slightly better in some areas, and PostgreSQL is slightly better in some areas. I would probably like to match all of those products together. It is just down to the functionality. For example, Oracle has a number of options within SQL that are outside of what you would class as the SQL standard. PostgreSQL misses some of those, but PostgreSQL does other things that are better than what Oracle does. I would like to merge those two products so that there is a certain amount of functionality in a single product.

We have been using it probably for two years.

In terms of the number of users, the users on PostgreSQL itself are probably application-level users, so you may only find two or three accounts per instance, but the application-level users can easily go up to 300.

We use the open-source product. We don't take it from any given supplier. So, we haven't got any tech support.

The tech support primarily is me. I am a systems administrator, and I do database administration as well. If we need any further in-depth support, depending on which product is sitting on top of that database, we will go to the vendor, but like most IT teams, we would admit that Google is your best friend.

We were using Sybase. We've actually transitioned most of it over to PostgreSQL.

It is easy to install. The deployment duration depends on what you're deploying. If you just want a database, I can have a PostgreSQL database installed and deployed in probably about 20 minutes. If you're looking for clustering or failover and mirroring, that would obviously impact the time, but it doesn't take a significant amount of time.

I deploy it myself.

It is open source. There is no licensing.

It is a very good RDBMS, and I'm quite happy with it. It does what it says, and it does it fairly well. I've seen some bits that are stronger in other products and some bits that are weaker in other products. My recommendation would depend on the requirements and the use cases.

I would rate PostgreSQL a nine out of 10. It does its job adequately, and I am quite happy with what it does at the moment. You wouldn't hear a 10 from me for any database vendor at the moment.

We use the solution to conduct surveys and consider this approach to be one which is cheaper for us. 

The solution is quite stable. This said, it's more prestigious to use MySQL, although we haven't made comparisons for safety and reliability.

The performance is too low, although we haven't tested for this. 

The interface climate could be better. There are many third party ones that we can use so it would be nice to see more support with the database diagrams.

We've been using PostgreSQL for certain small projects for the past three years.

The solution is quite stable for our use. 

We haven't tested scalability.

I cannot say for sure if we have plans to increase usage, as we have yet to run a test. 

While we do benefit from technical support, this is not something that we have required. 

The initial setup wasn't difficult. I'd say it was quite straightforward.

The installation took less than an hour. 

The need for our customers to pay for licences is contingent on their projects and budgets. It varies. 

We are not consultants to PotrgresSQL. We are usually consulted when it comes to using Microsoft MySQL Server, since we consider it to be quite robust and to have all the necessary support from Microsoft.

Fewer than 10 percent of our customers make use of PostgresSQL.

I would recommend the solution to others when when there is a desire to have projects and cost is a concern.

I would rate PostgresSQL as an eight out of ten, although this owes itself to personal preference and not to low performance. 

Any relational databases that you have in Oracle, you can move to PostgreSQL. This is what we have been doing at the moment. 

I like that you can move any relational database from Oracle to PostgreSQL. I also like that it's pretty stable.

The price could be better.

I have been using PostgreSQL for a few years.

PostgreSQL is quite stable.

We used Oracle before switching to PostgreSQL.

The initial setup and installation didn't take a lot of time. It usually takes about a couple of hours.

I implemented this solution by myself.

It could be much cheaper. If you would like to build an application on Amazon today, PostgreSQL is the standard database with Redshift. If you want other databases, you can add them, but PostgreSQL is the basis of everything. It's a question of money, that's it.

I would recommend it as a choice for people that want to move from Oracle to another database, which is relatively free. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give PostgreSQL an eight.

The reliability, performance, and extensive list of features are what I think matter the most in a production environment.

I have never been in an environment where PostgreSQL was not used. It was always used alongside other RDBMS solutions, depending on the specific requirements of each project. In this way, we were always sure that we would get the best out of it.

There are still things missing compared to other RDBMS, for example monitoring is a little behind as there not that many solutions out there. An equivalent of Oracle's RAC and/or flashback logs would be nice to have. There are a lot of steps need to get it back on the right direction with the logical replication and the parallel sequential scans.

What I mean is that despite the fact that there are things missing (like monitoring solutions and/or flashback logs etc.). Lately, there have been some developments that seem promising and set Postgres to a proper path. Two of these developments are the logical replication and the parallel sequential scans, and compared to other RMDBs, some could say that these are long overdue but nevertheless, they are a great addition and will definitely improve the performance/scalability/replication-capabilities of postgres in the current version and in the versions to come.

I've used this solution in an enterprise environment for a little over seven years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

I have never had a problem that was directly caused by PostgreSQL itself. Usually what happens is that a lot of databases are mistreated in the sense that they are misconfigured, or not designed properly, and then blamed for the issues that are happening as a consequence. Apart from some minor bugs that have recently been fixed, I have never had such an issue.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

There is no real customer service. There are forums where the core-committers and other people are usually very willing to help. I have tried posting a couple of issues I have had and I got a lot of feedback that was really helpful.

The initial setup is very easy. However, if you want to go deeper and understand how things work and how you can tune the database under various circumstances, then you need to read a lot of books and gather more and more experience.

I have never tried implementing it with a vendor. I was always part of an in-house team and we never faced any issues that would make us need to use a vendor team.

I am working with other databases, and not exclusively with PostgreSQL. A lot of other RDBMS require you to pay large amounts of money so I would say that you need to carefully plan your projects according to your needs. If there are specific needs that cannot be met with open-source software I can understand this choice, but otherwise I would always place more trust in the open-source software and its community.

I have tried and worked on other solutions such as Oracle and MySQL. I would say that the combination of PostgreSQL's features, plus the reliability and performance it offers in combination with the fact that you don't pay for a license was the reason I chose it.

There are some features missing compared to other RDBMS. The community is always expanding and more and more people use PostgreSQL every day. There are many forums where you can get information from and there are many different ways to contribute.

For this question I will focus on our usage of PostgreSQL in the company. A great differentiator for this database, if compared with other providers, is its easy extensibility and the existence of data types that would fall in the category of NoSQL. In particular, HSTORE (key/value store) and JSON (documents). This feature makes it possible to combine the strengths of relational and non-relational artifacts. Specifically transactionality and indexing vs. hierarchical structures and flexibility.

The company I work for creates economic time series and forecasting’s based on monthly surveys with companies. Besides a set of general questions, different sectors of economic activity include questions specific to their sector. This means that we have different sets of answers depending on the survey. Instead of having a separate table for each set of answers, it would be nice to have a single survey data table including all answers from all surveys. The Oracle implementation that was implemented around 13 years ago stored the numerically encoded answers in a string. Along with that there were tables associated for each question in the string field name, the starting position, and the width of the answer code within the string. This system is very prone to errors and, more problematic; it is not flexible enough to respond to new requirements in a timely manner if our researcher wished to add questions in single months that are relevant for that specific period in the economic history of the country. All this was only possible at the cost of long implementation and testing times and eventually was never really done. With PostgreSQL we moved what used to be a string with fixed positions into an HSTORE (a key/value store) field. We have now named answers (the key) and their values. The HSTORE field is flexible, i.e. adding a single question in a single month simply means that only for that month there is a key pointing to the single question's answer.

v9.5, which we currently don't have in our productive systems, already has some key features that we would like to use. In particular, row level security, a feature allowing to restrict the visibility of rows based on a set of policies. A feature that is not available yet and I would welcome is more of a by-product. PostgreSQL offers very good documentation features, which we integrated in the technical documentation on our internal Wiki. Changes in the database are immediately available in the Wiki without the need of editing the Wiki page manually. It is possible, and we do it, to attach comments on objects and their components. These comments also appear then in the Wiki documentation. Unfortunately it is not possible, i.e. there is not an implementation yet, to attach comments to function parameters and return type. We make extensive use of functions as structured interface to applications. This feature would make our documentation more complete. We created a workaround for that, but still, it would be nice to have it built in the database.

I use the open source database management system PostgreSQL in different situations. In the company I work for we have version 9.3.5 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4.7-4 64 bit. The choice of operating system and database version is not a thing we can influence much. Both are hosted by the central informatics services of the company and we have what we get. We can however decide which RDBMS to use and we chose PostgreSQL. For the web services that we implement for the association Swiss PostgreSQL Users Group we use version 9.4.6 on a Debian 4.9.2-10 (Jessie) server. Finally on my local development computer I use version 9.5.2 on LinuxMint 17.3 Rosa, a Debian like and Ubuntu based operating system.

In my company, PostgreSQL was introduced to replace Oracle slightly more than three years ago. Privately, I have been using PostgreSQL for about six to seven years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had no issues with the performance.

We had once a problem with a script that created a huge SQL statement with about 40,000 function calls. This led to a stack overflow. Thanks to the community mailing lists we were able to find quickly the origin of the problem and the correct approach to avoid it.

In this case that would map to the community support on mailing lists and IRC channels, and this type of service is very good. It is also possible, of course, to buy support from companies like Cybertec Schönig & Schönig GmbH (Austria), EDB in the US or 2ndQuadrant in Europe. I don't have direct experience with that, but I have often heard from colleagues that they are all excellent. This is quite simple to explain, because many of these companies' employees are active developers of the code base of PostgreSQL. They are also present on the many PostgreSQL mailing lists. If you are running a very critical system, and by that I mean a system, which failure could cause damages to people, I would strongly recommend that you hire at least two of these experts for a thorough audit.

We used Sentinel which was awesome but it did not provide metric views.

Installing a PostgreSQL cluster is straightforward. However, it is important to be aware of the architecture of the cluster, its configuration possibilities, and its authorization system. For the tuning of the configuration parameters there is no recipe, because it all depends on how the data looks like. Therefore it is necessary to understand what the individual parameters do and how they influence the overall performance. The correct usage of databases and schemas together with the authorization system, are important in order to build secure systems. It happens still too often on the world wide web that applications interacting with a database use roles with much too many privileges, creating security weaknesses. This however is not only a problem of PostgreSQL.

We did not implement the database software. What we implement is the design of the database and its interfaces toward third party systems and in-house applications. In the world of databases the person or team dealing with how data must be stored and accessed must possess complete knowledge about the processes being involved. It is not uncommon that web developer ask for accesses, which they are not entitled to and it is important to be able to offer an alternative. The most typical is a test database instance that web developers can use as playground.

PostgreSQL is a community product and has no owner other than the community itself. There are companies specialized in offering services and add-ons on top of PostgreSQL, but the database software itself is free, open source and licenced through a BSD and MIT derived licence of its own (https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/FAQ#What_is_the_license_of_PostgreSQL.3F).

Besides the simple fact of being an open product that can be used at virtually no cost, the quality of the code base is extremely good. The development process is transparent and the documentation is, with its 3000+ pages in the pdf format for version 9.5, exhaustive and complete. The community is very active and open to suggestions.

Stability, compound & functional indexing, MVCC, transactional DDL, GIS extensions, recursive queries, common table expressions, materialized views, procedural languages, triggers, and excellent documentation. PostgreSQL feels more like a mature, feature-rich, performant data platform than a simple datastore (I'm looking at you MySQL & Mongo).

Full ACID compliance for all transactions (including those with DDL changes) is supremely helpful when making modifications to the schema. The query planner and indexing functionality is second to none, making it one of the fastest database platforms available.

I would like to see the ability to reorder columns on a relation, as well as change the base SQL query that generates a materialized view without having to drop the view, provided the view's structure is unchanged.

I've been using it for over 12 years now.

Replication has been very easy to set up in recent versions. That said, there is a learning curve when it comes to server configuration.

We had no issues with the performance.

PostgreSQL does an excellent job of scaling.

There are companies that offer professional support. I personally have found the IRC channel to be an extremely effective channel of support, as many users and core contributors to Postgres often hang out there.

I've also used MySQL and MongoDB, but neither of those technologies provide any competitive advantage over PostgreSQL in any respect that comes to mind.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. That said, configuring the server past defaults can be rather complex. Properly tuning the server requires a fair amount of knowledge concerning the architecture of PostgreSQL itself.

In-house. That said, it's very easy to spin up an instance using Amazon Web Service's RDS product.

PostgreSQL is completely free and fully open-source.

PostgreSQL is the world's most advanced and performant SQL database available. It essentially beats out MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and often MongoDB on virtually every use case.

JSON support, especially the new JSONB data type is valuable . We used to have a mix of PostgreSQL and MongoDB to solve some of the complex problem around data schemas, now, we rely solely on PostgreSQL as our main datastore. Same flexibility with rock solid performance.

PostgreSQL has been a key component of our business, it is a rock solid product with years of expertise behind it, it is more cost-effective than Oracle and allows us to focus on innovation rather than licensing costs.

JSON support although great, it still has some gotchas, querying and manipulating JSON will be one of the topics I'd like to see some improvement, still feels not natural to work with it.

I've been using it for around four years.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

We haven't had any issues with the stability.

We haven´t hit the point yet when scalability is a problem, but it would be nice if horizontal scalability comes out of the box

So far the community has been great with us, every time we have a question or not sure what is the best way to tackle a problem, we have encountered someone that is able to share his knowledge with us.

It was pretty straightforward, initially our setup was not complex on purpose, we were looking for a simple yet reliable setup, that allows us to gain expertise before moving to a more complex one.

All in-house. My advice is to try to keep things simple, it is harder to learn from complex setups where the setup itself is a problem too, work on complexity once you feel comfortable with the expertise you have gained.

In our case, our ROI is very high, we do not pay for licensing, we use the community version of PostgreSQL and sometimes use companies that provide a hosted PostgreSQL.

We evaluated Oracle, MongoDB and CouchBase. Although those seem to be different products, they have some common features that worked for us, we decided to go with PostgreSQL because of its reliability and proven track record.

PostgreSQL is a great product, very mature and is evolving into other areas beyond SQL, in this times of connected devices and big data analytics, PostgreSQL can still be considered one of the key components and works very well with others. Being reliable is still one of the best ways to get a good ROI.

The solution is quite a good database for light applications for sure. This is how we are using it - as a front-end application and the canned database of PostgreSQL. The use case is comparable to Oracle, with quite a wide range of usage.

It's easy to install in Oracle and it's quite good to use for the canned database for content applications.

The solution is quite a good database.

Their pricing is very good.

The solution is very easy to use.

It's quite scalable.

The stability is good.

The installation is simple. 

I don't work with the solution often enough to really know if there are any missing elements. For me, for how I use it, it works fine.

We're only really using two to five percent of the functionality available.

While there's no perfect solution, we aren't using too much of the functionality to really be able to comment on what might be missing.

If it was free to use, it would be the perfect solution.

We're currently using the solution. We've used it at least over the past year.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The scalability is very good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so with ease.

We have around 2,000 people using the solution currently. It might even be a bit more.

We also use Oracle Database. I would say the two are quite comparable.

The installation is not overly complex. You just install it and start using it. It's simple. We are using AWS for both instances so it's simple and easy. That said, I was not personally involved in the installation process.

How many people you require for the implementation depends on the implementation itself. It can be one person or it can be five. It's difficult to say. In our case, we have only one person looking after all instances.

It's not an expensive solution.

I can't recall the exact version number of the solution. We're planning to move to the latest version.

The solution is installed in the cloud, however, it's a software as a service, provided by AWS.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's very comparable to Oracle.

While it does depend on the use case, for the most part, I would recommend the solution to other companies and users.