PostgreSQL Database Server

It is a great database, fast, powerful, never had any issues during years of usage, had no doubt about picking for my new project, surely can be recommended.

recently learned, I like to work with PostgreSQL

Besides http://www.postgresrocks.com/, take a look at http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/MySQL_vs_PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL leaves MySQL in the mud. Yahoo uses PostgreSQL for a two-Petabyte database (http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/05/yahoo-builds-two-petabyte-postgresql.html). What more do you want?

Again in the Good/Bad/Summary format:

The Good:
PostgreSQL is an incredible open source project. It is extremely full-featured and does everything an RDBMS needs to do. For real business applications, it is solid, stable, and scales quite well. (MySQL my be OK for simple web apps but it lacks a track record of data integrity and performance on real-world loads that PostgreSQL has.)

PostgreSQL has two features which make it stand out as a very powerful database, and possibly the most programmable of them all (regardless of open source vs commercial). First, PostgreSQL has an extensible procedural language sytem so you can write stored procedures in Perl, C#, VB.Net, Java, or Python. The second is a very good extensible type system which is sufficiently to allow one to create full-fledged types using only procedural languages to define them.

Finally, PostgreSQL has become an easier database to use and manage than any other RDBMS that I have tried (even easier than MySQL).

The Bad:
PostgreSQL does not allow any sort of parallel execution of portions of a query, so this limits scalability in certain environments (for example business intelligence and data warehousing). In short the entire query runs in one single-threaded process (other queries can run in other processes concurrently). While this doesn't cause many problems with most workloads, it can be an issue when we are talking about aggregates based on terabytes of data. In these cases, you cannot use the free open source version. This is a minor point but....

Also, another limitation is the lack of an ability to build shared-everything clusters with the software. Again, this is minor in most environments and if you need this,buy DB2 or Oracle....

Summary:
I gave this project a 5 because it does everything you want an RDBMS to do for nearly every workload. Sure there are a few advanced workloads it doesnt handle well but these are corner cases and in some of these, proprietary versions are available with these features.

Overall, great product. Probably the only FOSS RDBMS I will ever use.

This was the product that convinced me there's a point to open source. It's a well-managed, well-documented, well-focused, and competent project.

Weaknesses include scalability and performance. It does not yet compete with commercial systems in this regard. Stored procedures/procedural languages are a little wonky as well, but you can get the job done.

Numerous add-ins are robust and well-maintained. The product is a fave of educators and researchers resulting in some amazing tools to solve niche problems. Oracle and Microsoft aren't worried about losing database revenue, but I bet they're scared about the database extension community.