What is PostgreSQL? Introduction, Advantages & Disadvantages

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What is PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL is an enterprise-class open source database management system. It supports both SQL and JSON for relational and non-relational queries for extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL supports advanced data types and performance optimization features, which are only available in expensive commercial databases, like Oracle and SQL Server. It is also known as Postgres.

It is backed by an experienced community of developers who have made tremendous contributions to make it a highly reliable DBMS system.

In this tutorial, you will learn

A Brief History of PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL (initially called Postgres) was created by a computer science professor Michael Stonebraker and his team. Today it has become one of the popular open-source databases.

History of PostgreSQL

Let's see some important Milestone from PostgreSQL History:

Key Features of PostgreSQL

Below are the key PostgreSQL features:

Here, are some most prominent PostgreSQL features:

MySQL vs PostgreSQL

MYSQL PostgreSQL
The MySQL project has made its source code available under the terms of the GNU License, and other proprietary agreements. PostgreSQL is released under PostgreSQL License.
It's now owned by Oracle Corporation and offers several paid editions. It's free and open-source software. That means you will never need to pay anything for this service.
MySQL is ACID compliant only when using with NDB and InnoDB Cluster Storage engines PostgreSQL is completely ACID compliant.
MySQL performs well in OLAP and OLTP systems where only read speed is important. PostgreSQL performance works best in systems which demand the execution of complex queries.
MySQL is reliable and works well with BI (Business Intelligence) applications, which are difficult to read PostgreSQL works well with BI applications. However, it is more suited for Data Warehousing and data analysis applications which need fast read-write speeds.

Next, we will learn about PostgreSQL advantages and disadvantages.

Advantage of PostGRESQL

Below are the main advantages of PostgreSQL:

Disadvantage of PostGRESQL

Below are the disadvantages of PostgreSQL:

Applications of PostgreSQL

Financial Industry

PostgreSQL is an ideal DBMS system for the financial industry. Moreover, It is fully ACID compliant which makes it an ideal choice for OLTP (Online Transaction Processing). It is also capable of performing database analytics. It can be integrated with mathematical software like Matlab and R.

Government GIS data

PostGIS

PostGIS

PostgreSQL offers powerful GIS which is called "PostGIS". This extension provides hundreds of functions to process geometric data in different formats. PostGIS is highly standard compliant. Moreover, by using both QGIS or GeoServer, the Open Source community provides the easiest method to handle Geodata.

Manufacturing

Nowadays, industrial manufacturers also using PostgreSQL to speed up their overall business process. It also helps them to optimize supply chain performance by using this open-source DBMS as storage backend. It allows companies to reduce the operation cost of their business.

Web technology and NoSQL

If your website requires to deal with hundreds or even thousands request per second at that time, scalability is a surely big issue. Here, Postgre proves the best solution.

PostgreSQL works fine with all modern web frameworks like Django, Node.js,

Hibernate, PHP, etc. It also offers replication capabilities which allow to scale out as many database servers as you want.

Scientific data

You need to generate terabytes of data if you are working on research and scientific project. Therefore, it is important to handle in the most efficient way as possible. For that, PostgreSQL offers wonderful analytical capabilities and powerful SQL engine. This helps you to manage a large amount of data with ease.

Summary

 

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