About PostgreSQL

Why using PostgreSQL ? PostgreSQL is the most advanced open source database tool. It has been used and proved for years.

Check the latest PostgreSQL docs in our mirror.

Advantages of PostgreSQL

This is a brief list of PostgreSQL's advantages.

Features

PostgreSQL has most features present in large commercial DBMS's, like transactions, subselects, triggers, views, foreign key referential integrity, and sophisticated locking. It has also have some features they don't have, like user-defined types, inheritance, rules, and multi-version concurrency control to reduce lock contention.

Performance

PostgreSQL runs in two modes. Normal fsync mode flushes every completed transaction to disk, guaranteeing that if the OS crashes or loses power in the next few seconds, all your data is safely stored on disk. In this mode, we are slower than most commercial databases, partly because few of them do such conservative flushing to disk in their default modes. In no-fsync mode, we are usually faster than commercial databases, though in this mode, an OS crash could cause data corruption. We are working to provide an intermediate mode that suffers less performance overhead than full fsync mode, and will allow data integrity within 30 seconds of an OS crash.In comparison to MySQL or leaner database systems, we are slower on inserts/updates because we have transaction overhead. Of course, MySQL doesn't have any of the features mentioned in the Features section above. We are built for flexibility and features, though we continue to improve performance through profiling and source code analysis. There is an interesting Web page comparing PostgreSQL to MySQL at http://openacs.org/why-not-mysql.html

We handle each user connection by creating a Unix process. Backend processes share data buffers and locking information. With multiple CPU's, multiple backends can easily run on different CPU's.

Reliability

The PostgreSQL Team realize that a DBMS must be reliable, or it is worthless. It strives to release well-tested, stable code that has a minimum of bugs. Each release has at least one month of beta testing, and the release history shows that it can provide stable, solid releases that are ready for production use. It believes it compares favorably to other database software in this area.

Support

PostgreSQL's mailing list provides a large group of developers and users to help resolve any problems encountered. While them cannot guarantee a fix, commercial DBMS's don't always supply a fix either. Direct access to developers, the user community, manuals, and the source code often make PostgreSQL support superior to other DBMS's. There is commercial per-incident support available for those who need it. We suggest DBExperts.

Price

PostgreSQL is free for all use, both commercial and non-commercial. You can add our code to your product with no limitations, except those outlined in our BSD-style license stated above.

OBS: This list was originally extracted from the PostgreSQL FAQ and modified by Vita Voom.)

Comparision with other databases: