PostgreSQL Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services Reviews & Insights

Score8.4 out of 10

336 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for PostgreSQL are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Reliability and Performance: Users have consistently praised PostgreSQL for its reliability and performance, with many reviewers stating that they have experienced no downtime or issues related to the database. Some users also mentioned that PostgreSQL's performance is exceptionally fast, providing them with great speed in their operations.

Ease of Use and Flexibility: Many users find PostgreSQL easy to use and appreciate the availability of good open-source tools to work with it. Reviewers have highlighted that constructing queries in PostgreSQL is straightforward and that it integrates well with all development languages, making migration easy. The flexibility of PostgreSQL's user/role management system has also been praised by users, as it allows for easy control over access to tables.

Wide Industry Adoption and Community Support: Several reviewers acknowledge that PostgreSQL has achieved wide industry adoption, making it easier to integrate into a stack and hire knowledgeable developers. The availability of a huge online community for support was highly appreciated by users. Additionally, many users mentioned the extensive documentation available for PostgreSQL, along with the ease of finding examples, which further contributes to community support.

Reviews

10 Reviews

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

Don't be afraid on adopting it. PostgreSQL delivers more features than most of the paid databases from big brands.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 5, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently, we are using PostgreSQL to support some DevOps operations, mainly related to monitoring (as a Zabbix database server) and configuration management (it is the database used by our Puppet/PuppetDB environment). We use it as a regular deployment as well as a Database as a service (on AWS RDS).

Pros

Handle large amounts of data.
It is scalable (for reading purposes).
It is compatible with so many languages as the language for triggers and stored procedures.

Cons

PostgreSQL could have a solution to accept operations on all replicas.
Could improve its "full vacuum schema" in order to be less painful for applications.
Could have an in-memory table type instead of having to create a partition on an in-memory file system.

Likelihood to Recommend

I simply can't see any reason to use another object-relational database (other than licensing of compatibility with legacy applications) instead of PostgreSQL. I can surely affirm PostgreSQL is the most powerful, scalable, and reliable open-source object-relational database ever. Being able to handle a huge amount of data safely, PostgreSQL will offer you a final result many other paid options can't.

Erlon Sousa Pinheiro

Senior Devops Engineer in Information Technology at SOTI (Computer & Network Security, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

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Postgres - tons of people use it for a reason!!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 19, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Postgres for a variety of applications, from high availability/high traffic API services to simpler CRUD style single-page applications. It fulfills a need for a low-cost relational data store that has been tested and proven to work. Its use of common SQL is known by many engineers so the learning curve is very low.

Pros

Ability to handle very large datasets, 100's of GB
Great tooling, great selection of mature tools to pick from
Available in most cloud platforms
Easy to install and maintain
Low learning curve for engineers

Cons

I don't really have any big complaints, it's popular because it's good!

Likelihood to Recommend

Postgres is well suited for a variety of applications, especially where relational data is involved. Its low cost and its widespread use makes it an ideal choice when looking for a relational database. It's fast reading and writing, so it can be used in low latency applications like APIs. It works well in CRUD style applications as well.

I would not be my 1st choice for big data applications, querying extremely large data in Postgres can be slow.

Verified User

Manager in Engineering (Marketing and Advertising company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

PostgreSQL for yesterday AND today's data requirements

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 2, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

PostgreSQL is currently at the core of everything we do. For our organization we knew that we needed a durable, feature rich and flexible database. We have various storage needs including traditional relational setups with auditing for our quoting and invoicing. Inherited structures for project standards that can adapt as needed. And dynamic JSON based data for unstructured data. With PostgreSQL there hasn't been a data problem we have not been able to solve. It allows us to collect flexible data and migrate it into structured data sets that can be utilized with traditional tooling.

Pros

Runs on a variety of platforms with constant performance and features
Data integrity is guaranteed
Wide support for tooling
Expert advise from core developers is easy to get
Cloud support through RDS is stellar

Cons

Many see PostgreSQL as slow or old
Horizontal scaling not easy
No column re-ordering

Likelihood to Recommend

PostgreSQL is well suited for almost all industries and use case such as fInance, government, web apps, and even as a "NoSQL" document store with its JSONB/JSON and hstore capability. Its focus on ACID compliance makes it a trustworthy data store. It's a great central database with its ability to use external data sources and its ability to handle large workloads. Its ability to handle petabytes of data make it ideal for scientific and discovery workloads as well as AI neural networks. With PostgreSQL there is always a way to structure your data to make it fast and reliable.

Mark Mitchell

Vice President of Information Technology in Information Technology at MedSurvey (Market Research, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

20 years of experience

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PostgreSQL is great for data analytics and engineering work.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 24, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

PostgreSQL on Greenplum is being used as a data warehouse by the entire data and analytics team on my project. There are also other teams using the database as well, but it solves the business problems of running large analytics workflows with billions of rows of archived data to create reporting dashboards. It is able to run in a massively parallel processing format.

Pros

data processing
big data analytics
data aggregation

Cons

SQL syntax support
query error handling
programmatic access

Likelihood to Recommend

PostgreSQL is great as a data warehousing solution in large organizations but it is also problematic when it is improperly used as a transactional database. Postgres is a OLAP, not an OLTP database where you would use something like MySQL instead for storing live data. It has great read but poor write speeds.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Information Technology and Services company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

PostgreSQL: a great product that is easy to setup and easy to maintain!

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

February 12, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently, PostgreSQL is being used as an email texting mining tool, where I load a flat file email archive into postgresql and then auto-generate keys, which I can then use to find certain keywords.

Pros

PostgreSQL's file size is a plus: the fact that installing it on both a Windows and Linux system is easy and fast (even on a moderate connection) is helpful from an admin perspective.
Going off of that, it's very quick! It loads and creates tables quickly and provides a very similar interface to other implementations of SQL.
Using it as an Email Search system is unconventional (just a tad), but makes for a great back-end when you need to test-deploy a concept.

Cons

Its operations syntax is not like any other implementation, which means that along with installing it, you will need to pick up on how to create tables, etc.
In connection with the above point, attempting to essentially re-learn a set of commands is NOT a good idea. Especially since SQL has been around a long time at this point.
Which I think is why it's not widely adopted (in my opinion): Its syntax is very different (and obtuse). Plus, implementations such as SQlLite3 have beaten Post to the punch in the mobile market.

Likelihood to Recommend

The use case I am using it for - I have recommended to several entities: it's a good way to quickly get information out of an MBOX file format (which contains a lot of unstructured data).

Verified User

Consultant in Corporate (Computer & Network Security company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

PostgreSQL - A great database at a great price.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 18, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In my previous and current organisation we develop applications using PostgreSQL as one of or the database of choice to store application data. I have used it in both client-server implementations where it is used to store data for a single company as well as in cloud implementations where it is used to store data across many companies and users. Recently I have used it as the database in a data warehouse solution, data mining millions of rows.

Pros

The biggest reason I have used postgreSQL and continue to use it in places where I work - is the cost. There is none. It is a great feature rich database which doesn't cost you anything.
When using properly design database, tables, and relationships - we have not ran into any particular database limit

Cons

For my uses I have none. Currently we are developing a new application using the lastest version of PostgreSQL and are exploring any limitations.

Likelihood to Recommend

I have used it as a data warehouse, client specific database for a web application, test systems where each developer has their own schema for testing, local application database, and as a remote application database. It has worked well in each of these situations. Currently the main area where I would not use PostgreSQL is when I need an embedded database - in which case I would look at something like SQLite or other.

Louis Marceau

Software Developer in Information Technology at Curve Dental, Inc. (Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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The best of both Relational and Document DB paradigms

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 21, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use PostgreSQL across the organization for data storage across multiple web-based microservices. It's easily scalable, hosted on AWS, and provides deeper features we need when querying against complex data types (namely against JSON).

Pros

Native JSON support
Intuitive command line integration
Easy Docker hosting

Cons

Shared extensions. We use the pgcrypto extension (for UUID support) and frequently install it to the wrong schema by mistake. Extensions are difficult to move, and this is an easy mistake to make.
Clearer delineation between "databases" and "schemas" would help to better understand the system.

Likelihood to Recommend

PostgreSQL is very good for quick projects with structured data. It allows for easy schema development for complex relational structures and also for document storage (using JSON-encoding for documents). The query model against these nested JSON structures is amazing!

If looking for a strict document database, though, PostgreSQL might be overkill when compared to tools like DynamoDB.

Eric Mann

Tekton in Engineering at Tozny (Computer & Network Security, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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PostgreSQL, the best research oriented central database

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

November 3, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I used PostgresSQL as a GeoSpatial database for creating map server. For that I installed PostGis plugin which provides GeoSpatial functions which are useful for creating map tiles from vector data. A detailed description of what all I did with Postgres in this project can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/nitinpasumarthy/blog/createyourowntileserverandmapclient under sections 2 and 3 ("Process Data" & "Create tiles from Postgres").

Pros

Relational database with great collection of GeoSpatial functions
Open source which enables researchers to tweak and extend
Good resource for learning internals of a database like Query Optimizer, Buffer Manager etc.

Cons

Installation can be a little tricky sometimes. Wrote a decent blog post how to do it on a MAC - https://sites.google.com/site/nitinpasumarthy/blog/installingpostgresonmac

Likelihood to Recommend

Good if we want to extend the database and use existing plugins
Good for research and academic use cases like learning database internals
Not good in places where customer support is mandatory for enterprise (as far as I know)
Not good in cases where distributed system is required for availability as there are other better distributed database systems

Nitin Pasumarthy

Research Assistant in Engineering at Apple (Research, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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PostgreSQL is too often overlooked

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 26, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have used PostgreSQL as an application database for PHP, Ruby, and Java based applications. It has been used primarily for our customers' internet facing application. PostgreSQL presents a feature-rich open source database with many of the same capabilities as enterprise databases.

PostgreSQL presents a better stored procedure language as well as having better integration for geo spatial capabilities than MySQL. For setup and administration it is more flexible than SQL Server or Oracle.

In general, PostgreSQL tends to be overlooked.

Pros

The backend stored procedure language is complete, and lends itself to better programming and data manipulation tasks than MySQL.
PostgreSQL has complex data types like object columns and record data types that allow it to better mirror object relational structures directly within tables.
It is a fully SQL 92 compliant database even in its fully open source version.

Cons

For some more advanced features like replication, PostgreSQL can be a pain.
PostgreSQL can experience some bottlenecks under heavy read query load.
An in-memory or similar transaction caching strategy could greatly expand the appeal of PostgreSQL as developers look for other solutions such as Reddis to do in memory processing.

Likelihood to Recommend

For a general purpose SQL database that is fully SQL 92 compliant, PostgreSQL is a feature rich open source database. It is underrated in this area and frequently passed over in favor of MySQL or MariaDB. PostgreSQL is more akin to SQL Server or Oracle than it is to MySQL. For general purpose applications that need some database side programming, PostgreSQL is an excellent choice.

If you need a lighter weight and trivial to configure database, MySQL is a better choice. Also, PostgreSQL sometimes is not as performant as other solutions, meaning scale and load can be issues.

Christopher Weiss

Chief Architect in Engineering at Dewpoint (Information Technology and Services, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

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PostgreSQL - the last database you'll ever need

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 2, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

PostgreSQL serves as the database for our web-based product. As such it is used by the entire organization and is an integral part of the product.

Pros

Broad array of custom functionality/formulae built atop standard SQL statements
Transactional support for schema migrations
Great low-level performance tuning capabilities
Performant implementation of bulk merge (upsert)

Cons

Some of the custom SQL functions thatPostgreSQL provides could be optimized. Specifically I've seen that the "is contained within" operator for inet columns is slow to the point of being unusable in bulk (e.g. as a join criteria).

Likelihood to Recommend

PostgreSQL is in my opinion the best open-source option for any enterprise-level product requiring a standard relational database. Areas where it might be considered not ideal would include: smaller-scale projects requiring a database (MySQL might be an alternative here), or document stores with unstructured data (some would argue that NoSQL options are better here).

David McCann

Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Fast Orientation (Computer & Network Security, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

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PostgreSQL is too often overlooked

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 26, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

The backend stored procedure language is complete, and lends itself to better programming and data manipulation tasks than MySQL.
PostgreSQL has complex data types like object columns and record data types that allow it to better mirror object relational structures directly within tables.
It is a fully SQL 92 compliant database even in its fully open source version.

Cons

For some more advanced features like replication, PostgreSQL can be a pain.
PostgreSQL can experience some bottlenecks under heavy read query load.
An in-memory or similar transaction caching strategy could greatly expand the appeal of PostgreSQL as developers look for other solutions such as Reddis to do in memory processing.

Likelihood to Recommend

Christopher Weiss

Chief Architect in Engineering at Dewpoint (Information Technology and Services, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

View profile