PostgreSQL is one of the popular object-relational database management system (ORDBMS). It was developed at the Computer Science Department at the University of California. PostgreSQL is easy to set up and install. It offers support for SQL and NoSQL. It has a great community which happy to serve you when you are facing issues while using PostgreSQL.
Data Science has evolved, and while many data scientists still work with CSV files (text files with comma-separated values) these are not the best choice. The Python Panda library allows you to load data from CSV files but these files have a number of constraints. For example, they usually don’t connect to a database, requiring you to generate a new CSV file extract every time you have updated data. In the age of Big Data, this is simply impractical. Relational databases provide the required support and agility to work with big data repositories. PostgreSQL is one of the leading relational database management systems. Designed especially to work with large datasets, Postgres is a perfect match for data science.
PostgreSQL is very popular among data scientist because of its flexibility and extensibility. As we are going deeper into the digital world, the demand for open source database management is increased.
In 2020, PostgreSQL has the highest growth among the competitors, according to DBengine. The first 3 places are still Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server. 2 of which are commercial and expensive. And MySQL is lagging behind PostgreSQL in terms of features and progress.
The top 5 (including Mongodb), then Postgres is the only one which is well designed, best performance and high progress. And Postgres community is very strong with left companies backing them up.
PostgreSQL becomes the 1st DB to win DBMS-of-the-Year award 3 times, winning in 2020, 2018 & 2017 in the past.
Why to choose PostgreSQL
Cost-Effective: Postgres is extremely cost-effective and not much user training is required to learn how to use and program for this database. Also, maintenance and tuning requirements of the Postgres database are negligible as compared to other database systems.
Portability and Flexibility: The good thing about Postgres is that it is portable with almost all the major platforms and programming languages. This database is ideal for applications targeting multiple platforms. PostgreSQL has flexibility as it supports different kinds of techniques for geographic data storage like PostGIS and DBLink. Diverse indexing techniques are another feature of PostgreSQL, techniques such as Generalized Inverted Index and Generalized Search Tree are available. Additionally, there is support for network addresses, bit strings, text searches, JSON entries, and other data types.
Developers Tool and GUI: Postgres database server does not require extensive command-line configurations. Several tools and GUI interfaces have been developed which can aid you in easy installation and management of the database server. For example, PostgreSQL includes a speedy concurrency control that cancels out the need for reading locks. This is achieved by providing a modifiable “snapshot” of the database which does not affect the other transactions within the database.
Reliability and Stability: PostgreSQL is maintained by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, a diverse group of many companies and individual contributors. This group ensures the reliability and stability of the software. Additionally, Postgres is worldwide recognized as being the most reliable and stable database. The chances of database crashing are minimal and even if the database crashes there are ways and features which allow you to restore and recover the data.
Who uses it?
The PostgreSQL is widely used by companies around the world since it is such a great database system.
