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).
Co-Founder, CTO at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Full ACID compliance for all transactions is helpful when making modifications to the schema.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using it for over 12 years now.
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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
Replication has been very easy to set up in recent versions. That said, there is a learning curve when it comes to server configuration.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We had no issues with the performance.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
PostgreSQL does an excellent job of scaling.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
In-house. That said, it's very easy to spin up an instance using Amazon Web Service's RDS product.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
PostgreSQL is completely free and fully open-source.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Developer with 501-1,000 employees
You can call from SQL and dig deep into the query planner with its excellent Explain functionality.
What is most valuable?
PostGres is a fantastic modern RDBMS and its open nature allows you to get as low level as you need. You can define functionality, you can call from SQL and dig deep into the query planner with it's excellent explain functionality. The true open community is loaded with helpful people who believe in OSS. Every feature in PG is first, present, but secondly mature and just works. You may have bugs in your code but PGSQL will never be the cause of it.
How has it helped my organization?
It drives our enterprise architecture we are building.
What needs improvement?
The only thing that could potentially be improved is PGAdmin3, the DB Client that's has not been updated in quite a while. PostGres keeps ahead of the curve on it's feature set. For instance the new JSON column that's come out recently to provide nosql functionality that has been benchmarked to outperform mongo.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
We had no deployment issues.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product is quite stable, and provides awesome performance.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
There's been no issues with scaling it for our needs.
How are customer service and technical support?
It has a great support community.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I started with this product.
How was the initial setup?
It's very straightforward initial configuration if you start with your distro packeges.
What about the implementation team?
It's very easy, and you only need to familiarize yourself with its file structure. Sometimes you need to write your own plugin, so sometimes it is better to have it implemented by a vendor.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's free as it's open source.
What other advice do I have?
It's go good reliability and is very compliant with standards. If you are installing relational DB you likely know how to use one. If you're not familiar with RDBMS's make sure you look into and use the features of the DB like views etc. They all serve a purpose and will improve your development if leveraged properly.Huge feature set.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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March 2025

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TIBCO Middleware Architect & System Administrator at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It allows us to focus on innovation rather than licensing costs.
Valuable Features
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.
Improvements to My Organization
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.
Room for Improvement
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.
Use of Solution
I've been using it for around four years.
Deployment Issues
There have been no issues with the deployment.
Stability Issues
We haven't had any issues with the stability.
Scalability Issues
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
Customer Service and Technical Support
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.
Initial Setup
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.
Implementation Team
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.
ROI
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.
Other Solutions Considered
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.
Other Advice
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
IT Innovation & Strategy | Real Estate Strategy, Asset Management & Enabling Functions | GSUS at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Good performance and simple to use
Pros and Cons
- "What I like is that it's quite powerful in terms of performance."
- "I had some issues when I integrated with the Jupyter Notebook."
What is our primary use case?
We use it as an intermediary database for the collection of a variety of data points out of our data systems.
There are many departments that have different data, single points of truth. We asked them to give us different datasets, and we accumulated them in our Postgres-stored database.
It's an intermediary for a machine learning model.
How has it helped my organization?
I am more of a fan of doing things straight out of Python, but with the size of the data sets, we were forced to do it in SQL.
What is most valuable?
What I like is that it's quite powerful in terms of performance.
Part of the reason we use this solution is because of its simplicity and because it works. It does all of the basic things it's supposed to do and it's not anything fancy.
They are fulfilling their customer's needs.
What needs improvement?
I had some issues when I integrated with the Jupyter Notebook.
In the system administration, if you open the connection to the database with a notebook, there is no automatic closing of this connection.
I would like to see seamless integration with other tools such as Jupyter Notebook. We use it with Anaconda.
Also, possibly more streamline integration with more programming languages. An API for some different languages such as MARGO and JavaScript could be interesting.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using PostgreSQL for one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I had an issue where we couldn't find the fault, and it happened on occasion at the end of the day. Some of my basic queries would stop running.
I had some queries run for two days and some run for a day, then I would have to try it again the next day and it would complete in 20 seconds. Sometimes, it seemed to catch itself.
How are customer service and technical support?
I haven't had any contact with technical support from PostgresSQL. I do my research using Google.
How was the initial setup?
I did not initialize this database, but from what I understand it's very basic. It was simple to do.
What other advice do I have?
I would prefer programming languages to query languages. Scripting, for instance.
If you have a relational database then you want to use PostgresSQL. I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.
It's suitable for everything we use. There was nothing exceptional from my perspective, but it did everything we needed it to do.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Founder and Business Intelligence Consultant at Know Solutions
It is easy grow it from a small environment to a large one.
What is most valuable?
It is easy grow it from a small environment to a large one.
How has it helped my organization?
We use PostgreSQL as the basic tool for offering our data warehouse and BI solutions. This way my customers have a free tool and I can offer a lower price for our services.
What needs improvement?
It should have a better native client tool to manage the databases.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using it for nine years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
We have had no issues with the deployment.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
There have been no performance issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's been able to scale for our needs.
How are customer service and technical support?
I've never used it , but this tool has a big community and they are always open to helping.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had some problems with bigger customers using MySQL so we moved to PostgreSQL.
How was the initial setup?
It's very straightforward if you are using the default configurations. It can become complex when you begin to change these configurations to adapt it to fit your environment.
What about the implementation team?
In-house because we a are a technology company. I always advise to look for a consulting company, sometimes the default configuration is not enough and the tool can become a bottleneck if it isn't properly configured.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My advice is to always begin with the free licenses, and if you see that your tool is becoming a strategic solution, you can look into obtaining professional licenses.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Platform Developer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
We were able to integrate disperate data sources into our Postgres Data Warehouse.
Valuable Features
Overall it is an excellent RDBMS and it is easy to use and administer. In PostgreSQL 9.5 the table inherent Foreign Data Wrappers(FDW) is available. This extension is available for most databases which makes building server federation very possible.
In 9.5 support for FDW was improved which means it is now possible to import a complete foreign schema. Foreign Table inheritance is now supported as well. They have also improved the Foreign Query optimization since v9.4. Lastly, It has low maintenance requirements so not much has to be done as far as DBA tasks go.
Improvements to My Organization
We were able to use the latest features described above to facilitate the integration of disperate data sources into our Postgres Data Warehouse.
Room for Improvement
- Improved support for parallel query execution
- Merge Joins
- Improved Handling of Materialized Views
Use of Solution
I've been using it for years.
Deployment Issues
We have had no issues with the deployment.
Stability Issues
There have been no performance issues. It's a very stable environment.
Scalability Issues
It's been able to scale for our needs and easy to extend when needed.
Customer Service and Technical Support
Although there is no tech support, it has a large user community who are always helping each other.
Other Advice
The last few versions work great out of the box without much config changes. Don't be afraid to try it.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Support for vectors, XML, JSON, UUID and the functions and operators for them are useful.
Valuable Features:
- Very good indexing solutions, especially for arrays and text search on large quantities.
- Very good behavior on large databases (>800GB) and large tables.
- Datatypes - support for vectors, XML, JSON, UUID and the functions and operators for them are very useful.
- Programming languages - I deeply appreciate the extensibility of the server to allow more than one language for scripting functions. We mostly use PL/SQL, but recently I've tried PL/v8 and was astonishing to see that it works.
- Execute with Query Parameters is a big plus for us as there are no type conversions needed to run dynamic queries reducing the run time by approximately 25%
- There is a huge amount of community interest in developing and supporting the product.
Improvements to My Organization:
All of our BI needs are implemented using PostgreSQL functions. Our tools are designed in such a way that the BI is implemented as much as possible through our database. We need a lot of flexibility to extend the BI logic on a specific installation.
Room for Improvement:
Synchronous replication is needed, and although I have only searched the web for a couple of hours the only solutions I could find were at the application level of the database.
XML and JSON manipulation functions need to be improved as for some applications we need to add new elements to these "structures". To do this with JSON I currently use a PL/v8 extension.
Deployment Issues:
We have had no issues with the deployment.
Stability Issues:
There have been no performance issues.
Scalability Issues:
It's been able to scale for our needs.
Other Advice:
Try it out! Sometimes, due to the high degree of configurability and extensibility, you might see some issues arise, but it's not that difficult to figure out what's happening. You will definitely be amazed by the SQL features and extensibility.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Technical Lead with 1,001-5,000 employees
It improves the query performance a lot. Sometimes it hangs and then we need to stop and start the services again.
What is most valuable?
PostgreSQL gives you much more flexibility because it's open source.
How has it helped my organization?
It improves the query performance a lot and helped in some real time and analytic reporting
What needs improvement?
Sometimes it hangs and then we need to stop and start the services again
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used it for three years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
We've had no issues with the deployment.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
There have been no stability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have had no issues scaling it.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
7.5/10
Technical Support:7.5/10
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No other solution was used.
How was the initial setup?
It was straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
We used a vendor team.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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Very good review
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