Rating and comments for PostgreSQL

Really open source and free. Excellent community support.

This is THE RDBMS!

A superb product and an outstanding completely open alternative to closed-source commercial versions. The documentation is first-rate and well organised so you don't spend 10 minutes wading through marketing-buzzword claptrap to find the necessary information. Why can't I give it eight stars? ;-)

This is by far the best OpenSource database out there. It is called "postgres" because it was the database that the team under Michael Stonebraker built after they developed Ingres. So Postgres has all the benefits of the awesome Ingres design but it's object oriented as well giving you both relational and object features.

It easily rivals Oracle and is the only database to come close to being a plug-in replacement to Oracle. No other commercial or OpenSource DB out there comes close to this claim.

In terms of ease of installation and administration it beats Oracle hands down. In terms of system resources it requires far less computing grunt that Oracle for the same job.

But most of all, in terms of availability of support, the massive online community out there combined with the availability of source code, the numerous commercial support providers and the excellent, clear, available and honest documentation means that Postgres leaves Oracle in the dirt. It's the ease of administration and support that makes PG stand out against all the commercial databases.

All this for a price tag of zero. Zilch. Nada.

And the release cycles of the product have always ensured that only the most stable of systems get to be released. In my very extensive experience in all the big databases bar DB2, Postgres releases have the fewest bugs, the most stable releases and the quickest bug fix cycles of all the major enterprise-grade DBs out there.

And although MySQL is rapidly approaching enterprise level, Postgres has been at the enterprise grade almost from its start, is very mature at this level and is the only OpenSource truly enterprise database grade database out there.

Compared to MS SQL Server, Postgres today is where SQL Server may achieve several generations from now.

Really open source and free. Excellent community support.

After switching to postgres for a commercial app (mysql license is as gray as can be) I never looked back. Not only it is really free, but it is way better.