In praise of PostgreSQL August 5, 2021 on Drew DeVault's blog
After writing Praise for Alpine Linux, I have decided to continue writing more articles in praise of good software. Today, I’d like to tell you a bit about PostgreSQL.
After 25 years of persistence, and a better logo design, Postgres stands today as one of the most significant pillars of profound achievement in free software, alongside the likes of Linux and Firefox. PostgreSQL has taken a complex problem and solved it to such an effective degree that all of its competitors are essentially obsolete, perhaps with the exception of SQLite.
For a start, Postgres is simply an incredibly powerful, robust, and reliable piece of software, providing the best implementation of SQL.2 It provides a great deal of insight into its own behavior, and allows the experienced operator to fine-tune it to achieve optimal performance. It supports a broad set of SQL features and data types, with which I have always been able to efficiently store and retrieve my data. SQL is usually the #1 bottleneck in web applications, and Postgres does an excellent job of providing you with the tools necessary to manage that bottleneck.
Those tools are also exceptionally well-documented. The PostgreSQL documentation is incredibly in-depth. It puts the rest of us to shame, really. Not only do they have comprehensive reference documentation which exhaustively describes every feature, but also vast amounts of prose which explains the internal design, architecture, and operation of Postgres, plus detailed plain-English explanations of how various high-level tasks can be accomplished, complete with the necessary background to understand those tasks. There’s essentially no reason to ever read a blog post or Stack Overflow answer about how to do something with Postgres — the official docs cover every aspect of the system in great depth.
