Why Is PostgreSQL Getting So Popular
Tags: apacheage, postgres
Published: 2023-07-25 21:43:09

PostgreSQL is a popular open-source relational database with numerous benefits for developers, including feature availability, standards compliance, community support, and project governance.
This article will discuss some of the main factors that influence developers' decisions to use PostgreSQL for data management. These include project governance, community support, and the availability of features and standards compliance.
Let's see what are those factors:

## Open-Source Development and Community:

PostgreSQL is an open-source project developed by The PostgreSQL Global Development Group, distributed under the Open Source Initiative-approved License. Its community-driven development increases user participation and offers high-quality extensions and applications for administration, business intelligence, data management, and programming languages.

## SQL Standards Conformance:

PostgreSQL excels in adherence to SQL standards, developed by ANSI and ISO groups. Although no database currently satisfies all requirements, PostgreSQL satisfies more of the SQL specifications than other options, conforming to at least 160 out of 179 core requirements.

## Robust Feature Set:
PostgreSQL offers numerous features for performance, security, programming extensions, and configuration, making it a popular choice. Some of these features include:

- Support for writing database functions using different programming languages.
- Support for a huge number of data types.
- Ability to define your own complex types.
- Full-text search for finding and operating on data in semi and unstructured text.
- Robust authentication, access control, and privilege management systems suitable for organizations of any size.
- Foreign data wrappers to represent and access tables and data in remote servers.
- Views and materialized views
- Comments on database objects.
- Write-Ahead Logging to provide point-in-time recovery, failover, and streaming replication..
- Support for NoSQL-like behavior such as storing documents using JSONB and key value pairs with hstore.

## Object-Oriented Database Features:

PostgreSQL's core design sets it apart from other relational databases. Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs) are software designed for handling relational databases, storing data in table-like structures with predefined columns and data types.
PostgreSQL is an Object-Relational Database Management System with relational capabilities and object-oriented features in addition to the properties supported by RDBMS.
PostgreSQL enables defining complex data types, overloading functions, and defining inheritance relationships between tables. This powerful tool allows modeling different types and relationships within the database system, ensuring consistency and adherence to intended behavior.

## ACID Compliance:

ACID stands for atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability in computer science, ensuring data integrity and avoids validity errors.
Relational databases prioritize ACID compliance for structured data storage, while non-relational databases conform to BASE initialism which stands for basically available, soft state, and eventual consistency.
PostgreSQL has been providing ACID compliance since 2001, using a single database engine for default transactions. This ensures ACID compliance without database locks using multiversion concurrency control (MVCC). MySQL only supports full ACID compliance with InnoDB or NDB engines.