What Is PostgreSQL Used For?

To fully answer the question — and to make the information relevant and solution-focused for enterprise businesses and organizations — we’ll also ask and answer a couple more. 

In building-block order, here are all three questions, followed by short answers (but please don’t go anywhere; we’ll expand on the answers and build to an enterprise-grade payoff):

• What is PostgreSQL? PostgreSQL is open source relational database management software.
• What is PostgreSQL used for? It’s used for data management (shocker), application development, and data analytics.
• Is PostgreSQL enterprise-ready? No. Vanilla PostgreSQL is not enterprise-ready. (But read on, and we’ll tell you ways to make it enterprise-ready.)

Now, let’s go deeper — and get to the enterprise, production-ready solutions.

PostgreSQL is a lot more than an elephant in the room

Let’s expand on the answer to the first question: What is PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL hasn’t just been a concern to its competitors; it’s swooped past most of them.

StackOverflow statistics show that 26% of developers preferred it in 2017, 34% in 2019, and 40% in 2021. Most recently, in StackOverflow’s 2022 Stack Developer Survey, PostgreSQL took a slight lead over MySQL (46.48% to 45.68%) as the most popular database platform among professional developers. 

In another survey, using multiple metrics for overall popularity, PostgreSQL ranks as the fourth most popular database management system (DB-Engines, March 2023). 

The widespread use and popularity have come on like gangbusters in recent years, but PostgreSQL wasn’t always the cool kid. It has evolved steadily, however, during 25 years as an open source project. (Craig Kerstiens, crunchydata, August 2023)

That evolution has created lots of reasons for its expanding popularity. PostgreSQL has powerful and advanced features, including asynchronous replication, full-text searches of the database, and native support for JSON-style storage, key-value storage, and XML. PostgreSQL is also highly extensible, enabling users to add custom functionality through plug-ins and extensions. (Extensibility is good, but it’s certainly not automatic, so more on that later.)

Another reason for PostgreSQL popularity (perhaps the biggest): It’s open source and free to use, distribute, and modify. Anyone can use it — for private, commercial, or academic purposes.

And there’s a global community dedicated to keeping it open source. That community spans expertise and industries, putting diverse skill sets and fresh perspectives into the review and improvement of code. Bugs and security vulnerabilities are identified more quickly. How-to documentation is readily available.

More on security and reliability

These days especially, security is a big draw, and with the right setup (bookmark that one, too), PostgreSQL delivers advanced and proven features, including internal authentication, external server-based authentication, SSL encryption, data encryption at rest, and the ability to define custom roles and permissions for users.

Reliability is yet another factor in the PostgreSQL popularity upswing. Here are elements that form the backbone of that reliability:

• PostgreSQL has a robust transactional system that ensures data integrity and consistency, even in high-transaction environments.
• A multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) system ensures multiple users can access the same data simultaneously without conflicts or data loss.
• It’s well-suited for organizations that require mission-critical applications with high availability. PostgreSQL supports multiple concurrent users and can handle complex database operations without downtime or data loss.
• PostgreSQL is ACID-compliant, which means it meets the principles of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability — the key properties of a reliable database system. 

PostgreSQL vs. MySQL

The aforementioned attributes explain why many are turning to PostgreSQL, but why do users go with PostgreSQL instead of MySQL (which edges out PostgreSQL for simplicity and ease-of-use)? Here are potential reasons:

• PostgreSQL offers advanced SQL features, including support for complex queries, window functions, common table expressions (CTEs), and more.
• PostgreSQL has more advanced data integrity features and constraints, allowing for finer control over data validation and enforcement of business rules.
• PostgreSQL has superior support for JSON data types, making it a good choice for applications requiring structured and semistructured data.
• PostgreSQL has advanced support for geospatial data and geographic information system (GIS) functionality, making it a preferred choice for applications that deal with location-based data.
• PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is more permissive than MySQL’s dual licensing (GPL or commercial). 

Stampeding across platforms and industries

In our introduction, the second question asked: What is PostgreSQL used for? These days, it’s used for a lot of high-stakes purposes and by a lot of people.

General PostgreSQL use cases

In addition to being used as a backend database management system, here are other general uses of PostgreSQL software:

Website applications: Because PostgreSQL can handle high volumes of data and concurrent users efficiently, it’s suitable for applications that require scalability and performance.

Geographic information systems (GIS): PostgreSQL is often preferred for mapping and related services because of its advanced support for geospatial data.

Data warehousing: PostgreSQL enables businesses to store and analyze large amounts of data for reporting and business intelligence.

Data analytics: With the right extensions and configurations, PostgreSQL can support analytical processing and reporting. (Again, more on extensions and configurations later.)

Social media platforms: Companies use PostgreSQL to manage user profiles, posts, connections, and interactions.

Industry-specific PostgreSQL use cases

Businesses and organizations across industries use PostgreSQL. Industry-specific uses include:

E-commerce: Many e-commerce businesses use PostgreSQL to produce, process, and manage product catalogs, customer data, orders, and transactions.

Financial institutions: Because it’s ACID-compliant, PostgreSQL streamlines and safeguards transaction handling in financial systems and online banking.

Science and research companies: PostgreSQL databases are used to store and analyze experimental data, research findings, and other information.

Healthcare organizations: PostgreSQL is used to store patient records, medical history, and other healthcare data.

Government: PostgreSQL is used in government and public sector activities such as voter registration, public records management, and administrative databases.

Educational institutions: PostgreSQL is used to manage student information, course schedules, and academic records.

Telecommunications: PostgreSQL is used for managing call records, billing information, and subscriber data.

Building on that solid foundation

Now it’s time to go more in-depth on the third question: Is it enterprise-ready?

There’s no doubt PostgreSQL provides a solid foundation for innovative development. It’s reliable, robust, feature-rich, and performant. But unfortunately, in its vanilla form, PostgreSQL does not have all the components needed to create large-scale, complex systems and applications that meet the needs of enterprise businesses and organizations. 

To make PostgreSQL work across the enterprise, you have to acquire a multitude of additional components, including tools for high availability, disaster recovery, monitoring, and observability. Then those tools have to be configured and tested to work together. Such a do-it-yourself approach adds complexity to the IT team’s work and requires them to build PostgreSQL infrastructure from various open source extensions. Additionally, the IT team must have the expertise to maintain the deployment at peak performance. The challenges can slow down the pace of innovation.

You can also cover enterprise production requirements by going with proprietary PostgreSQL forks. But then you’re beholden to one vendor who can lock you in. The licensing can be expensive, and innovation can be limited or squelched. The pitfalls of vendor lock-in are real.

Enterprise-grade PostgreSQL out of the box

If the DIY approach seems daunting and the lock-in of a proprietary fork makes you squirm, there’s a third alternative — Percona for PostgreSQL. 

Percona makes PostgreSQL work out of the box for enterprise infrastructure, empowering you to innovate freely. Percona for PostgreSQL is a suite of open source software, tools, and services for deploying and maintaining reliable production clusters without the overhead of the vanilla PostgreSQL configuration.

The heart of the Percona for PostgreSQL solution is Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL. It includes a native PostgreSQL server, enhanced with add-ons from the open source community, certified and tested to work together for extreme high availability, backups, security, and monitoring. It all helps ensure the cluster’s peak performance. 

Alternatively, if you’re making a cloud-native push, Percona Operator for PostgreSQL simplifies deploying and orchestrating reliable PostgreSQL in Kubernetes.

To keep everything in your mission-critical production environment on track, expertise is always there. Support and Managed Services from Percona provide organizations with the help needed to achieve and keep PostgreSQL at peak performance. From migrations, database design, and architecture … to performance assessment and tuning … to proactive monitoring and management of your databases — you’re covered.

And because you’re covered, you’re also free. Free from vendor lock-in. Free to scale and deploy anywhere, at any time. Free to innovate.

Learn more about Percona for PostgreSQL