Robust and Somewhat Daunting But Worth the Effort
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We built a software service for online education providing metadata about courses offered ranging from MOOCs to private vendors. This entire service architecture ran on a PostgreSQL backend which required monitoring, optimization, replication, and other features to maintain service level agreements with the consumers of our service, which was intended for web and mobile clients. We used Apache Solr integrated with the PostgreSQL back end and needed advanced monitoring and optimization to ensure blazing fast searches. Postgres Plus Advanced Server gave us the suite of tools we needed including the ability to easily hook in from the client language of our choice as well as manage, optimize and maintain the utmost security in our database platform.
Pros
- Developer tools including debugging, JSON and XML support, libraries for preferred languages and good examples all facilitated integration and development. Robust features for developers.
- Security is top notch and supports far beyond what we required for our project, which is a good thing.
- Performance, throttling, monitoring and optimization are all top notch and helped us keep response times low and save on bandwidth and hosting costs.
Cons
- Documentation is excellent but spread out across many resources and can take a while to wade through—would benefit from having more intro level, getting started guides for various languages.
- Ruby support is excellent but more Ruby examples and beginner-level documentation would be nice.
- It is sometimes hard to find a community of users on StackOverflow so a larger community, and a dedicated forum with active members to answer questions and work through issues would be nice.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's great if you are using or wish to use PostgreSQL and need the added performance optimization, security features and developer and DBA tools. If you need compatibility with Oracle it's a must-have. There are many developer features that greatly assist dev teams in integrating and implementing complex middleware. It's great for optimizing complex database queries as well as for scaling. I would recommend Postgres Plus Advanced Server for any software development team that is hitting the limit of what PostgreSQL is capable of and wants to improve performance, security, and gain extra developer tools.
