PostgreSQL

What do you like best?

Easy Installation and Configuration, supports multi-platforms like Windows, macOS, Linux, use existing applications.

Highly reliable open source RDBMS.

Lots of features compared to its competitors.

What do you dislike?

Lacks schema versioning, Parallel data query, Feels lacking in performance compared to competitors especially in writing to the database. Postgre upgrade from 9 to 10 was not that great, there was a lot of downtime. Lacks in-memory modes.

Less documentation which may be impediment to new users.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

PostgreSQL is best suited for small and medium development projects. While there is a bit of a learning curve compared to MySQL and SQL server, which may be an issue for the beginner but if you are an experienced software developer or database admin, it is almost perfect for you.

It provides broad feature sets, which are handy for incremental development.

The best part is it's free, so it is a cheap and almost equal alternative to SQL Server since you need to pay a lot for licensing costs of SQL Server for businesses and enterprises.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I work as a consultant and we work on providing technical solution to our clients. We suggested PostgreSQL to one small company we were working with.

I believe PostgreSQL is best suited for smaller and medium sized development project. Since this is open source, it has all the features which are needed for smaller and medium development project. This is also easy to administrate. Postgres has an incredibly flexible and simple-to-use user/role management system.

Postgres usage is increasing in the industry and I believe its market share has increaed to 6% lately. It is really easy to integrate PostgreSQL into our stack. Because of high adoption rate, hiring a developer to implement or service Postgres is easy. Most of the major database libraries of common web frameworks are out there like Rails - ActiveRecord, Spring-Hibernate, Play Scala-Slick. These libraries have out of the box Postgres support, thus no extra configuration is needed for our web applications to read or write to PostgresSQL.