Over the last few years, the software development community’s love affair with the popular open-source relational database has reached a bit of a fever pitch. This Hacker News thread covering a piece titled “PostgreSQL is the worlds’ best database”, busting at the seams with fawning sycophants lavishing unconditional praise, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. While much of this praise is certainly well-deserved, the lack of meaningful dissent left me a bit bothered. No software is perfect, so exactly what are PostgreSQL’s imperfections?

I’ve been hands-on with PostgreSQL in production since 2003 with deployments ranging from small (gigabytes) to modest to very large (~petabyte). My perspective is largely from building and running systems that are at least intended to be continuously available. Needless to say, I have gained first-hand experience with PostgreSQL’s particular idiosyncrasies through some painful production issues over the years.