PostgreSQL limitations (2024)

FAQs

What is the limitation of PostgreSQL? ›

One of the main limitations of PostgreSQL is its lack of support for horizontal scaling. This means that as the workload on a PostgreSQL database increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to distribute the load across multiple machines to improve performance.

Slower performance:

Therefore, it performs slower especially when there is a large number of data stored in the rows and columns of a table containing many fields of additional information to compare.

One of the well known limitations of PostgreSQL is its lack of horizontal scalability: Postgres is built to scale up, not out. If you are building an application such as a payment system that will be processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, you should prepare for scale.

Scientific Research: Scientific research and projects require terabytes of data, which needs to be handled efficiently. The SQL engine and the analytical capabilities of PostgreSQL help to manage the vast amounts of data easily and draw insights quickly.

PostgreSQL is preferred for managing read-write operations, large datasets, and complex queries. But it's not preferred for read-only operations.

Postgres automatically creates indices for unique fields including the primary key fields. The default data structure of B-tree. This is a balanced tree of size 8KB, which will make the depth of just 3 even though the number of records is billions!

According to the official PostgreSQL versioning policy page, the final PostgreSQL 11 release is expected by November 9, 2023.

On the other hand, MySQL uses a single process for multiple users. As a result, MySQL database outperforms PostgreSQL for applications that mainly read and display data to users.

Features: PostgreSQL offers a more extensive range of features than SQL Server, including support for native JSON data type, table inheritance, and many other advanced features. SQL Server, on the other hand, offers features that are specific to Microsoft products, such as integration with Microsoft Office.

Do people still use PostgreSQL? ›

Despite its limitations and performance bottlenecks, people still perceive it as eating the database world and it remains the most used and loved system by developers.

We believe that developers should be using PostgreSQL for everything, and we are improving PostgreSQL so that they can. Customers use Timescale not just for their time-series data but also for their vector data and general relational data. They use Timescale so that they can use PostgreSQL for Everything.

Using hypertables, PostgreSQL databases can manage hundreds of terabytes without the complexities of traditional partitioning, offering a scalable and efficient solution for large-scale data management.

Some of the world's largest software companies, such as AWS, Fujitsu, Google, Microsoft, NTT, and VMWare invest heavily in Postgres, thus making sure PostgreSQL is vibrant, healthy, and innovative.

LIMIT and OFFSET are used when you want to retrieve only a few records from your result of query. LIMIT will retrieve only the number of records specified after the LIMIT keyword, unless the query itself returns fewer records than the number specified by LIMIT.

Column names in PostgreSQL: Must contain only letters (a-z, A-Z), numbers (0-9), or underscores ( _ ) Must begin with a letter or underscore. Must be less than the maximum length of 59 characters.