Summary

PostgreSQL has come a long way in the last five years. After building solid database fundamentals, the many developers adding features across the globe have made significant strides in adding both new features and performance improvements in recent releases. The features added to the latest PostgreSQL 9.0, making replication and read scaling easier than ever before, are expected to further accelerate the types of applications the database is appropriate for.

• The extensive performance improvements in PostgreSQL 8.1 and 8.3 in particular shatter some earlier notions that the database server was slower than its main competitors.
• There are still some situations where PostgreSQL's feature set results in slower query processing than some of the commercial databases it might otherwise displace.
• If you're starting a new project using PostgreSQL, use the latest version possible (and strongly prefer to deploy 8.3 or later).
• PostgreSQL works well in many common database applications...