The reliability, performance, and extensive list of features are what I think matter the most in a production environment.
Senior Database Engineer at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
What is most valuable?
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used this solution in an enterprise environment for a little over seven years.
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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
There were no issues with the deployment.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's been able to scale for our needs.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Consultant at a tech consulting company
It offers strong enforcement of data types, because it can catch many errors and mistakes and protects data.
What is most valuable?
Strong enforcement of data types, because it can catch many errors and mistakes and protects data. Standard conformance, because in the end you are not locked to single vendor.
How has it helped my organization?
We used MySQL for many tasks, because there were simply more documentation available, but while using it, we found many serious weaknesses with it like no data validation even for string length, no transactions, etc. PostgreSQL catches a lot of things that MySQL didn't because it is serious about the data it protects!
What needs improvement?
It needs more parallelism for big tables. This is already in PostgreSQL 9.6 beta so things are looking promising.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using it in production since 1999.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
We have had no major issues with the deployment, but tweaking does need to be done.
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?
Excellent mailing lists with active developers. Once I sent them my query which was about slow performance due to double sorting (group by, order by), and the fix for it went into PostgreSQL 7.4, because Tom Lane noticed that in such cases PostgreSQL should not do two sorts. So after upgrading to 7.4 things got way faster without touching the code at all.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used MySQL. PostgreSQL tries to solve things in the correct way for all platforms, all file systems, and all users. In the end, this means you get a better working and more stable system. They try to stay away from hacks and other non-portable or limited solutions and prefer to work inside the system. For example, an operating system already does many optimizations so why would one want to reinvent things with raw file systems, etc. like Oracle tried to do in the past?
How was the initial setup?
Defaults for PostgreSQL are very low. In almost all situations one has to do some tweaking to make it perform better. It does not take much time to do it at first, but has to be done!
What about the implementation team?
I did it myself with help from the internet. For beginners, I would advise you to read the documentation that is available. Also, you should read some books such as "PostgreSQL: Up and Running, 2nd Edition". "PostgreSQL Administration Essentials", "PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook, 2nd Edition". Alternatively, you could look into getting professional help if you are in hurry.
What other advice do I have?
Explore this new world. PostgreSQL has taken a quantum leap over the last 20 years, and now it seriously threatens more established database vendors.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. I teach and consult for EnterpriseDB which is a PostgreSQL partner.
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BI Expert at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
It has easy integration with a lot of visualization tools such as QlikView and Tableau.
Valuable Features
GIS function. Geography is a very important function/dimension for our f. Postgres helps analyse that easily.
Improvements to My Organization
It provides access to data for analytics. It has a lot of free tools available for data access, and has easy integration with a lot of visualization tools such as QlikView and Tableau.
Room for Improvement
They need to develop an easy way to do a cross-DB query and some basic report visuals and alert systems would make it awesome, if they are possible.
Use of Solution
>2 years
Deployment Issues
We had no deployment issues.
Stability Issues
The product is quite stable.
Scalability Issues
There's been no issues with scaling it for our needs.
Customer Service and Technical Support
It has a great support community.
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.
Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing
It's free as it's open source.
Other Solutions Considered
For me all SQL tools/products are similar, except for a few important differences like GIS functions in PostgreSQL, and programming abilities in Oracle PL/SQL, etc.
Other Advice
Go ahead with the product which has the best use case for your organization. Cost is never an issue.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Front-End Developer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
It provides a lot of valuable documentation and there's widespread usage of it.
Valuable Features
PostgreSQL provides a lot of valuable documentation and there's widespread usage of it.
Improvements to My Organization
I use it for personal projects. It's been really easy to learn and it's been useful since ramping up it use.
Room for Improvement
Although there's documentation out there, it needs even better documentation. Another thing that would be helpful are examples of usage of it with JavaScript.
Use of Solution
I've used it for six months.
Deployment Issues
There were no issues with the deployment.
Stability Issues
We have had no issues with the stability.
Scalability Issues
We had no issues scaling it for our needs.
Customer Service and Technical Support
I haven't had to contact technical support. There's been no reason to do so.
Initial Setup
It was straightforward and well integrated into Rails applications across open source world.
Other Advice
Compare and contrast various database optimizations based on your needs. And when you come across issues, don't reinvent the wheel -- someone has probably had a similar problem to your own.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Director of Operations / Senior Software Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Since we are using Django/Python – it works great with PostgreSQL as well. The current features that really help us are Full-Text Search, Array Fields, and JSON Fields.
How has it helped my organization?
By using PostgreSQL, it was easy to get all the developers configured and running. With using it as our back-end for data storage, our company isn’t worried about data loss or data integrity, especially with snapshots and WAL. Our company is also able to run reports and do analytics off data in custom tables.
What is most valuable?
PostgreSQL does a great job with scalability and performance. Since we are using Django/Python – it works great with PostgreSQL as well. The current features that really help us are Full-Text Search, Array Fields, and JSON Fields.
What needs improvement?
The only thing I would really want/need to improve is pgAdmin3. pgAdmin3 is a nice tool for SQL Admin and Queries. But, I wish it would allow multiple queries to be run and displayed in the output pane.
Also, it would be amazing if Full-Text Search would work on encrypted data, but I don’t know how that would be possible with any kind of speed.
In regard to pgAdmin 3, there are so many times I’m in one window running different queries. In Microsoft SQL Server, you can select and execute multiple queries and they are shown in the output pane as separate sections. In pgAdmin3, I have to open multiple windows and execute separate queries and jump from window to window looking at / comparing results.
For the Search/Encryption, PostgreSQL supports having certain fields encrypted in the database (https://www.postgresql.org/doc...). It also supports Full Text Search (https://www.postgresql.org/doc...). But, if we encrypt the fields where the lexemes are stored, search won’t work. (Some of the lexemes could give too much information if a user got their hands on the table.)
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used this solution for three years.
How are customer service and support?
Everything we have needed, we’ve been able to find on https://www.postgresql.org/ or StackOverflow.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had used Microsoft SQL Server in our previous company. But, the licensing terms kept getting more and more onerous. We started looking at PostgreSQL from the reviews and recommendations, especially since it was open source and Amazon RDS started supporting it.
How was the initial setup?
Initial setup was very straightforward. EnterpriseDB has a great graphical installer to help install on our Dev machines (MacBook Pros). And, AWS RDS makes it is very easy to get set up as well. It allows us to spend our time developing, where our expertise is.
What about the implementation team?
Our initial implementation was done in-house. As long as you follow the step-by-step directions, everything worked great. We also have a managed services company that helps manage the PROD/Staging configuration as well.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing/licensing is the reason we went with PostgreSQL. As a startup, every dollar counts and PostgreSQL has enabled to us to have an enterprise solution at a fraction of the cost of Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.
What other advice do I have?
PostgreSQL is an amazing product. Very easy to implement and there are many libraries to make it easy to use PostgreSQL as a back-end database solution, no matter what coding language you are using.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Big Data Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It stabilizes organizational databases, tables rarely get locked, and report extraction is faster.
Valuable Features:
I have not used any enterprise PostgreSQL product. I have only used the open-source version of PostgreSQL. I like the following features:
- Locking: Tables very rarely get locked, while with MySQL, it’s a frequent problem.
- Easy backup and restore
- Reporting uses Windows functions / aggregates function
- Partitioning
Improvements to My Organization:
By implementing PostgreSQL, organizational databases get stabilized, no locking issues occur and report extraction is faster.
Room for Improvement:
I would to see the following improvements:
- Replication: Table-level replication should be built-in. However, we can do this now by using Slony.
- Backup: Currently, an incremental backup feature is not available. It should be added.
- A simple-to-use PG cluster monitoring dashboard would provide an extra advantage.
Other Advice:
So far, it’s the best database I have ever used.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Chief Data Architect at a tech company with 51-200 employees
It's an open-source, license-free product that can go head to head with the likes of Oracle & DB2 and hold its own.
Valuable Features:
The features we use most often are:
- PostgreSQL streaming replication
- PITR-based backups
- CTE SQL
- SQL windowing functions
Room for Improvement:
I'd like to see the following improvements:
- Streaming replication (or similar) disconnected from the version, so we can use it for upgrades (i.e., a 9.3 version master and a 9.5 slave)
- Better scaling options such as sharding tools, parallel query and star schema-aware queries
- Better partitioning support to include better / packaged partition management and the ability for the base table to return the number of rows affected even if the affected rows are in a partition
Other Advice:
Get some expert help; I cannot stress this enough. We often walk into DB setups and architectures that are a wreck because the team "knew enough to be dangerous". Even more often, we see database isolation, meaning the DB is not connected to the enterprise data architecture. That mistake leads to expensive problems down the road.
It's an open-source, license-free product that can go head to head with the likes of Oracle & DB2 and hold its own in terms of features and performance, in many cases beating the competition.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The Foreign Data Wrapper means we can integrate it, and provide interoperability with other databases.
Valuable Features
- Replication which enables us to use it for High Availability.
- The Foreign Data Wrapper means we can integrate it, and provide interoperability with other databases.
- Multi-master Replication helps us to distribute a database geographically without any hassle or performing maintenance for synchronization as this it is all done during the replication process.
- PostgreSQL has a cleanly designed object basis RDBMS, so there are many opportunities to hook/plugin the PostgreSQL to get more functionalities and features.
Improvements to My Organization
Before using PostgreSQL, we had a database issue that we were trying to solve with Oracle. However, Oracle is quite expensive and I heard from a colleague that Oracle increases their charges year on year.
Room for Improvement
There are many places that it could be improved through the provision of more plug-ins and extensions, such as data distribution, load balancing, new data types, indexing and searching, etc. They could also make it easier to access data manually.
PostgreSQL is Open Source Project, it is never ending development process and maintenance. Since 1996 up to now already 20 Years, PostgreSQL has been borne as Open Source, while before it was an academic research. There are already some improvement actually, such as: Load-balancing can be achieved by Multi-master Replication or PostgresXL with real clustering model. Multi-master replication a.k.a Bi-Directional Replication is best implemented in data distribution topology.
There are many solution from that new features. It already a time to go to implement it on High Performance Transaction system, huge system implementation, mission critical system, most of the time, PostgreSQL is implemented in the financial and service industries, including banks, insurance, loan companies etc.
As an Object based Relational Database, there are many opportunity for expansion of PostgreSQL in many ways. We can create another data type, we can create another programming languages for functions. etc. There are limitless opportunity for expansion of PostgreSQL features, and it is already surpassed Oracle, in terms of Performance, Capability and Enterprise Features.
Use of Solution
We've been using it since 2003, when it was v7.x
Deployment Issues
We have had no issues around the deployment.
Stability Issues
Usually stability issues are caused by misconfiguration or misuse.
Scalability Issues
We've been able to scale it for our needs.
Customer Service and Technical Support
Since this is open source it doesn't have its own support. Therefore, my company provides support as a Maintenance Service Provider. We offer 24/7 support as well as the delivery of sophisticated deployment, tuning, consultation, and support of PostgreSQL.
Initial Setup
It was straightforward.
Implementation Team
We were helped in the implementation by the vendor. You should always let an expert do the implementation as if it is configured incorrectly it can have a big impact on performance.
Other Advice
I would recommend PostgreSQL to anyone who wants to save costs and deploy a reliable enterprise class database server.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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