Postgres has advanced significantly in recent releases. With new features and capabilities alongside several longstanding components and extensions, Postgres can support virtually all of today’s data types as well as unstructured and semi-structured data. This is meaningful for two reasons:
- Postgres can power many applications written for NoSQL technologies.
- Developers can build applications in Postgres that achieve the same results as NoSQL solutions.
Relational databases are and will continue to be the day-to-day workhorses for mission-critical applications that must adhere to ACID properties. Relational table storage and the SQL language are well understood and optimized standards of relational databases, and the skills are transportable across SQL databases and well known by a large pool of developers with decades of broad market support.
The ability of Postgres to support key-value stores within the database through the HStore contrib module as well as document databases through Postgres' JSON data type empower users to address expanding demands using the skills and tools with which they are already familiar. Exploring new capabilities within Postgres to address more data problems instead of turning to new solutions ultimately means lower costs, less risk and less complexity while delivering enterprise-class workloads with ACID compliance.