Scalability, High-Availability Redundancy
PostgreSQL has massive support and that has a lot of options to choose from. PostgreSQL includes streaming and logical replication built-in to the core package of the software. You may also able to setup a synchronous replication for PostgreSQL to have more high-availability cluster, while making a stand by node process your read queries.
Support for Several Procedural Languages: PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, and PL/Python:
Since version 9.4, PostgreSQL has a great feature where you can define a new procedural language in accordance to your choice. Although not all variety of programming languages are supported, but it has a number of languages that are supported. Currently, with base distribution, it includes PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, and PL/Python.
The external languages are:
- PL/Java
- PL/Lua
- PL/R
- PL/sh
- PL/v8
PostgreSQL Forks
A fork is an independent development of a software project based on another project. there are more than 20 PostgreSQL forks; PostgreSQL extensible APIs make PostgreSQL a great candidate for forking. Over the years, many groups forked PostgreSQL and contributed their findings to PostgreSQL.
The following is a list of the popular PostgreSQL forks:
Greenplum is built on the foundation of PostgreSQL. It utilizes the sharednothing and massively parallel processing (MPP) architectures. It is used as a data warehouse and for analytical workloads. Greenplum started as proprietary software and open sourced in 2015.
The EnterpriseDB Advanced Server is a proprietary DBMS that provides Oracle with the capability to cap the oracle fees.
Vertica is a column-oriented database system that was started by Michael Stonebraker in 2005, and was acquisitioned by HP in 2011. Vertica reused the SQL parser, semantic analyzer, and standard SQL rewrites from the PostgreSQL implementation.
Netzza, a popular data warehouse appliances solution, was started as a PostgreSQL fork.