Preface

Picking the right database management system is a difficult task due to the vast number of options on the market. Depending on the business model, you can pick a commercial database or an open source database with commercial support. In addition to this, there are several technical and non-technical factors to assess. When it comes to picking a relational database management system, PostgreSQL stands at the top for several reasons. The PostgreSQL slogan, "The world's most advanced open source database," emphasizes the sophistication of its features and the high degree of community confidence.

PostgreSQL is an open source object relational database management system. It competes with major relational databases such as Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server. Its licensing model allows commercial use without any limitations and there are a lot of companies offering commercial support of PostgreSQL. For this reason, start-ups often favor PostgreSQL. Due to its rich extensions, it is often used for research purposes. PostgreSQL code is also a base for a few open source and commercial database solutions such as Greenplum and Amazon Redshift.

PostgreSQL runs on most modern operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux flavors. Its installation and configuration is fairly easy, as it is supported by most packaging tools, such as apt, yum, or Homebrew. Also, there are interactive installers for Windows and macOS. There are extensions and tools that help to manage and monitor PostgreSQL servers, such as pgAdmin and psql. PostgreSQL complies with ANSI SQL standards, which makes it easy to learn and use for database developers and database administrators. Other than this, there are a lot of resources helping developers to learn and troubleshootPosgreSQL; it has very good and well-structured documentation and a very active and organized community.

PostgreSQL can be used for both online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) applications. In addition to that, PostgreSQL supports both pessimistic and optimistic concurrency control, and the locking behavior can be chosen based on the use case. PostgreSQL provides a lot of features that help to handle very large amounts of data efficiently, such as partitioning and parallel execution. PostgreSQL is scalable thanks to its replication capabilities. All this makes PostgreSQL attractive because it can be used to set up highly available and performant data management solutions.