PostgreSQL Reviews

I am using PostgreSQL to develop a general ledger system. The solution is on-premise right now, but it's going to be on the cloud soon.

PostgreSQL makes it very adaptable to several descriptions of a record. Instead of having several tables or several relations for one entity, I can adapt this entity. It can be a multiform entity. For example, here in Mexico, a company and a person can be sold to us as a physical entity or a physical person.

Each of these entities has some things that are common, such as name and registration for an identity for the ISR in the US and in Mexico's it is called the SAT. We have to have different characteristics for each of them. In PostgreSQL, I can easily create a field for this moral person, with a different set of fields. It allowed me to have some plasticity on each entity that I am describing. People that are working inside the company, have some requisites that are different from one position to another. This plasticity allows me to move it for every person that is inside the company. PostgreSQL allows me to do all of this will ease. This feature is called H store, it is wonderful. 

I'm using the replication that they have inside, in case one company may wish to have the solution on-premise, they can have the replication feature that is already embedded and it's free. You don't have to pay again for that solution.

PostgreSQL could improve by providing a geographical solution for tracking trucks and people in the field. They might already have features similar to this and I have not found them. I haven't done research about this topic.

I have been using PostgreSQL for approximately six years.

The solution is stable.

PostgreSQL is scalable.

I have not used the support from PostgreSQL. I have not had any large problems.

I have found all the information I need online in many of the communities they have.

I was previously using Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL.

With MySQL, I had once a terrible problem with a group that was only giving me the first record of a group. I had to implement it through other means for the solution to give me the result that I was required.

The initial setup of PostgreSQL was very simple. I am using Ubuntu and you only have to go to the synaptic and download the package and it's already stable. It can be down in a matter of minutes, it's wonderful.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate PostgreSQL a ten out of ten.

I have used it in the past for some web applications and back-end databases. In my current organization, we are using Microsoft SQL Server.

It is very useful for both structured and unstructured data. You can store unstructured and structured data in PostgreSQL. It is easy to use. You can easily manage things through PostgreSQL Admin.

It is cost-effective. Its on-premise version is free. It is agnostic of on-premise or cloud. You can install it on the cloud or on-premises. It is available with all clouds, and you can also install it on desktop or Windows Servers.

It would be good to have machine learning functionality in this solution, similar to Microsoft SQL Server and other solutions. Machine learning capability for a basic level or a common user would be useful.

It can also have good reporting capabilities.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years.

PostgreSQL has been in the market for a long time. It is quite stable.

It is scalable. In my past organization, its usage had increased a lot. I had implemented data management and many other things on PostgreSQL.

In terms of the number of users, we had hundreds of users who used this solution. For development, we had seven or eight developers. We also had technical support and application teams.

I have not interacted with the support of Postgres because when it is on the cloud, it is managed by the respective cloud provider's team.

We used to provide service to various clients, and we were also providing internal services. We used different solutions in parallel, such as Amazon Redshift, MySQL. MySQL is also free. I have also used Oracle and IBM Db2 in other organizations.

Its installation is simple and easy. If it is in the cloud, you have to go for a subscription. On a desktop, you can install it with normal Unix commands.

I have not done full server version installation myself. If we go for Azure Cloud, its API is available. It takes five minutes to get it up and running on the cloud version. For desktop deployment, you can complete your setup within half an hour. 

It is open-source. If you use it on-premise, it is free. It also has enterprise or commercial versions. If you go for the cloud version, there will be a cost, but it is lower than Oracle or Microsoft. 

I would definitely recommend this solution. It is a very good database to have. It is also very good as compared to other tools.

I would rate PostgreSQL a nine out of ten. 

PostgreSQL is an open source database, so there is no associated licensing cost for the software and we always have a new version easily available. It runs on all major operating systems, although I have always used it on UNIX platforms.

It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It is highly scalable, both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate.

PostgreSQL runs stored procedures in a lot of programming languages (Java, Perl, C/C++, etc.). It includes many built-in functions from basic math and string operations to cryptography and Oracle compatibility. Triggers and stored procedures can be written in C and loaded into the database as a library. PostgreSQL uses a multiple row data storage strategy called MVCC to make PostgreSQL extremely responsive in high volume environments. Allow hot backups.

I have worked at the Ministry of Economy in the IT area, for more than 20 years ago. Since then, the main developments have always used PostgreSQL for their robustness, reliability, stability, and conformity with the standard SQL.

I have noticed that it consumes a lot of resources. I would improve this aspect.

We had no issues. PostgreSQL statistically does not suffer falls, it simply works.

We had no issues. We had to modify some configurations but the impact was almost transparent.

All the obstacles that we encounter are solved with information obtained on websites. PostgreSQL has a community of thousands of users and professionals who contribute their experience, so I always have found a solution for all my issues.

I have used other solutions for over 20 years and the problem of licensing has been our biggest drawback because of the costs and dependence we require from the provider.

It is extremely simple. In addition, we have several databases in production so we always start with a configuration model already tested and reliable.

I recommend PostgreSQL without doubt because my experience of almost 20 years with this product has shown me that PostgreSQL has certain features that make it highly reliable: high scalability, robustness, available for multiple platforms, extensible with little effort and without additional cost, designed for high volume environments, easy to manage and extensive online support.

I recommend everyone to get into the PostgreSQL world, with no licensing costs. PostgreSQL uses a flexible and business-friendly license because it does not restrict the use of PostgreSQL with commercial and proprietary applications. Those who choose PostgreSQL forget the dependency on a provider, the price of the licenses and the changes in the license conditions.

We got carried away by the experience of a team member with experience in PostgreSQL and first we used the tool in applications of low concurrency of users but with storage of files pdf, doc and xls in the tables. We were surprised by the results. This is how we trust in PostgreSQL and we demand more and more. We always get good results. Sometimes we have had to migrate to a new version of PostgreSQL, but have done so without any problem(s).

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.

Twice now, I have been involved in the decision by a company to migrate away from MS SQL Server to Postgres. The first time, it was simply a matter of scalability. Once you approach 10 TB of data, managing it in MSSQL becomes problematic. You reach limits on performance, backup/recovery and general maintainability. The second company that I assisted in performing this migration chose Postgres due to the TCO as well as the ability to scale the databases horizontally.

The feature that I find most useful (and in fact critical) is the extensibility of Postgres. We installed the extensions that were important to us and ignored anything that wasn’t useful. This allows us to maintain a highly customized configuration that is still able to be supported and maintained by third-party vendors.

One of the key ways that Postgres has improved the functioning of our organization is by freeing up financial resources that can then be applied to upgrading existing infrastructure. A side benefit, of course, is that by bringing in another platform, we have given current staff the ability to grow their skill set and experiment with a new, feature-rich environment. This improves employee satisfaction and makes our CFO happy at the same time.

I would really like to see a more mainstream approach to support what we see as critical extensions. One example is the FDW (foreign data wrapper) for MSSQL. This extension hasn’t been updated in several releases and would benefit from an overhaul. In general, the Postgres community is not as enthusiastic about supporting integration with Windows products (MSSQL, AD, etc.) as they are about other products like Oracle, GIS and full-text searching.

I have been involved in various aspects of Postgres for approximately two years. This includes both single-node installations as well as multi-node clusters using PostgresXL.

The only issue I have ever come up against is internal support. Implementing Linux and Postgres in an environment where only Microsoft has lived has been challenging at times. Administering Postgres on Ubuntu (or any other variant) takes a far different skill set than supporting SQL Server on Windows.

As far as scalability goes, I have yet to identify the limits of Postgres. We will be looking at the newer multi-node options from 2nd Quadrant later this year.

Like any open source product, your mileage may vary. There are several VERY good third-party options for technical support. That being said, this product is not for the faint of heart or the technically unsophisticated shop.

See my answer above. We evaluated both open-source as well as proprietary solutions. Of the open-source solutions we examined, Postgres has the best track record for innovation and enhancements. While the user base is smaller than some of the more established solutions, the fact that it has been able to avoid being “acquired” by a major player is, in my opinion, a plus.

Postgres will work straight out of the box on most platforms. However like all of the database vendors in the Unix space, the ability to modify the configurations are extensive. The degree of complexity is less than Oracle or Sybase but certainly more complex than something like SQL Server. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you must understand how your operating system handles memory. The most complex part of the Postgres installation is, by far, security. I would recommend getting help before tackling the HBA configuration file.

Both times I have been involved in an initial Postgres implementation, we have handled it in-house. It isn’t too hard to implement but you do need some base tech skills including Unix. I would not recommend trying to implement it on a Windows server.

For us, the ROI was almost immediate. We saved several $100k in license costs alone. Overall, the manpower costs to support Postgres and Linux will depend on whether those skills already exist in your enterprise. If you plan to take a Postgres system live in production, I strongly encourage you to look into commercial support.

If you can, do it!

The product is easy to use and works fast for relational databases.

There could be a plugin to distribute the data on servers for the product.

We have been using PostgreSQL for one month.

I rate the platform's stability an eight out of ten. It could be better.

The product's scalability for large databases needs improvement. Like Oracle, there could be an option or solution to manage if the data exceeds.

I have used MySQL.

The initial setup process is easy. It takes about ten minutes to compete.

It is an open-source platform.

If you need a relational database, the product is a good fit. However, it is complicated to scale for large data. I rate PostgreSQL a nine out of ten.

We have a use case for the solution which was related to a website that we developed for a Spanish energy line transmission company. The company used to face a lot of legal issues in Brazil. We had created a SaaS product that helped them to monitor the Brazilian legal parameters. The company had used the product only for two years and then discontinued it.

The company also faced many internal problems where they had to urge the lawyers to get used to the SaaS products. The lawyers wanted to input information into another system and this is where we used PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL has complete SQL dialects and is useful for writing sophisticated and complex queries. We have experience with Oracle database. My partner is experienced in DDA and he writes sophisticated SQL queries. The solution helps to get the job done in the best possible way.

In today’s age, most developers do not have strong SQL knowledge or language command. They find it difficult to write even a SQL statement. These developers write cool queries which perform badly on the database end.

As DBAs, we constantly urge the developers not to write bad queries, help them learn more, and write placebo commands.

I find it difficult to get connectors on the tool. For example, .NET has only one free provider in PostgreSQL. I need to pay the provider if I need something more sophisticated features. Other languages like PHP and Java have good community support. We need community support for .NET.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. PostgreSQL is an open-source enterprise-grade product and is available free of cost. The tool doesn’t have a big company behind it. The solution is very well documented and you can find a lot of information from the community. The solution is a good product compared to MySQL. People have been moving away from MySQL ever since it became an Oracle product.

PostgreSQL can handle heavy loads. I follow some of the most important DBA professionals in the industry and they are using this product. This tool is a rock-solid product and the most advanced relational database software that is open source.

Some open-source solutions have a restriction on the license but there are no problems when commercial applications use the solution. You cannot use a commercial product with open-source solutions that have license restrictions.

The database is used for our customers' products. We also offer some products on our POC system, and our customer's POC systems post some data stored on PostgreSQL on the cloud. Our company's data doesn't store at PostgreSQL. We still have our system MS SQL and Oracle.

The solution is very easy to use. You don't have to be extremely knowledgeable or technical to take advantage of it.

The product is quite flexible. 

We find it to be one of the cheapest options on the market. It's not expensive to use. 

The pricing could be better.

We've used the solution for ten years at this point. It may even be longer.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any issues with it. We haven't experienced bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

The solution is scalable. We've made some upgrades on our system, and it was so easy to do for the actual upgrades. In terms of the database itself, we haven't really had any issues with it.

I don't have any experience with technical support. Other teams in our company end up handling that. I can't speak to their knowledgeability or responsiveness having never worked with them.

I don't recall us using a different product.

In terms of the initial setup, we generally use the cloud system. The cloud system is very easy to set up these days. If you choose some with pre-installment, you trigger the system, and it's pretty automatic. You don't need a lot of things configured. After that, after you start to use it, you can tune it as you like. We made some adjustments on the system - such as additional storage or additional RAM or other resources - and we were able to add those in very easily.

The production system we use for reporting is a read-only system. Due to this, if we use the production system for reporting or other kinds of big data, the system can be slow on the customer side. However, Postgres can still service all the tasks which we need.

We haven't needed too many people to handle deployment and maintenance. There's been around ten or so that have been on it.

The pricing is reasonable. Of course, our economy has been hurt a little due to COVID-19. The pandemic has affected a lot of us. It's been hard for the companies that sell services with a database cost. You really have to choose the lowest-priced options right now. Postgres offers a fair price on the market, currently. That said, it could be less expensive, especially right now.

We definitely plan to continue to use the solution in the future. It's been quite good for us.

That said, I'm not in the financial department and I don't know the exact cost of the solution.

We're just customers and end-users.

We generally use the last version, as we try to ensure all of our programs are the latest technology. Therefore, we generally use cloud platforms like Amazon or Microsoft, which is Azure. Whichever version is on the cloud, we generally use that version.

That said, some of it is on the cloud and some of it is on-premise. In Turkey, we have some legal requirements that require some data to be stored in our country. We have to store it locally. Therefore, we can't use the cloud completely.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

I would rate the product at an eight out of ten.