# PostgreSQL

816 Hacker News commenters recommended PostgreSQL and 233 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 10 years (42 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** A free, open-source relational database people trust for nearly everything (queues, JSON, search, vectors) and run for years; critics cite query planner limits and horizontal scaling difficulty.

## Why people recommend it

- Handles queues, JSON, search, vectors (6 comments): "Relational databases are incredibly flexible even if you have a NoSQL mindset, you can do data modelling like that in Postgres too with jsonb data types." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48789516)) "We are using Postgres as a worker queue in production for many years, with millions of items being processed at any time and it's been perfectly fine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48666944)) "currently using psql (in a single monolithic codebase) as: sql db, json db, vector store, logs store, full-text search, queue, message bus." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49362019))
- Stable, open source, long-lived (3 comments): "Postgres is in another league from SQL Server. Because Postgres is linux native and open source, its flexibility, introspection and operability, just doesnt have a comparison in SQL Server." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738583)) "The Postgres ecosystem is pretty unique in its ability to produce a “boring” stable product, innovate, stay F/OSS, and create financial outcomes for participants." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48091442)) "I can rely on gifts to the world like Linux, Debian, PostgreSQL, Apache, Nginx, Caddy, and Yggdrasil without any problems for decades." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026936))
- Scales enough for most organizations (4 comments): "everything I've read about people using it in prod tells me that most organizations never really grow beyond requiring anything more than what it offers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216578)) "We are using Postgres as a worker queue in production for many years, with millions of items being processed at any time and it's been perfectly fine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48666944)) "I've dealt with postgres DBs larger than that in size though with no stored procedures and have never run into such problems." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090649))
- Easy setup, widely supported everywhere (5 comments): "The setup cost is basically zero anyway. Add apt repo, apt-get install the correct version. Easy to run different versions at the same time too. Upgrading is annoying." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49322192)) "I've tended to favor PostgreSQL for container dev simply because it is well supported in pretty much every first and second tier cloud provider out there." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025430)) "You can also absolutely run Postgres on your vps, the setup is slightly more complicated than sqlite, but it's a matter of 15 minutes vs 5 minutes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745645))

## What people warn about

- Query planner lacks hints, adaptivity (4 comments): "The SQL Server query planner is head and shoulders above what Postgres offers in the types of optimizations it will apply to your queries." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731863)) "PG being process based per connection instead of thread based makes it much more difficult to share plans between connections" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46697789)) "One of my biggest annoyances with the Postgres core team has been their reluctance to implement any sort of adaptive planning" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49213435))
- Hard to scale horizontally (2 comments): "Funneling all of your scaling issues into Postgres, which isn't always the easiest to scale horizontally, can start to be a problem." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47179161)) "Right now, these retries trigger multiple round trips for Postgres, making it a performance bottleneck for high-contention workloads." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48114693))
- Vacuum, wraparound and storage overhead (4 comments): "Postgres uses something like 24B overhead per row. That is not a issue with small Tables, but when your having a few billion around, each byte starts to add up fast." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906846)) "The result is that the presence of an operation wanting an exclusive lock blocked the data path for the duration of the autovacuum. Major outage." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264309)) "In practice, with an OLTP workload, substantial InnoDB purge lag problems are much rarer than Postgres XID wraparound problems." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49079684))
- Complex to run and upgrade (3 comments): "The setup cost is basically zero anyway. Add apt repo, apt-get install the correct version. Easy to run different versions at the same time too. Upgrading is annoying." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49322192)) "Sure Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Postgres, and all the other standard tools in the box are open source and free, but they're also arcane and complex to run" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983083)) "Having to look up and spend time fixing permissions every time itself makes using Postgres for simple uses difficult for me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46907091))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [MySQL](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mysql.md): 124 recommend
- [Microsoft SQL Server](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-sql-server.md): 73 recommend
- [Microsoft Access](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-access.md): 62 recommend
- [Turso](https://hackerapproved.com/p/turso.md): 53 recommend
- [MariaDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mariadb.md): 40 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "PostgreSQL", https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgresql/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).