Enterprise-Grade Reliability
Proven ACID compliance for guaranteed data integrity
Full crash recovery with Write-Ahead Logging (WAL)
Point-in-time recovery with continuous archiving
Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) for consistent reads without locks
Robust replication with logical and physical options
Advanced Data Types
Native JSON and JSONB for document storage with indexing
Geographic objects (PostGIS) for location-based applications
Arrays, ranges, and user-defined types
Full-text search with linguistic support
UUID, HSTORE, XML, and other specialized types
Time series optimization with TimescaleDB extension
Powerful Query Capabilities
Sophisticated query planner and optimizer
Common Table Expressions (CTEs) and recursive queries
Window functions for advanced analytics
Materialized views for precomputing complex results
Partitioning for managing large tables efficiently
Parallel query execution across multiple CPU cores
Extensible Architecture
Custom functions in multiple programming languages (PL/pgSQL, Python, Perl, etc.)
Foreign Data Wrappers to integrate external data sources
Pluggable storage engine architecture
Over 100 extensions for specialized functionality
Custom operators and index types
Comprehensive Security
Row-level security for fine-grained access control
Column-level privileges and data redaction
SSL/TLS encryption for client connections
Strong authentication methods including SCRAM and GSSAPI
Audit logging for compliance requirements
Modern Developer Features
Stored procedures and triggers
Event triggers for database-level events
Asynchronous notification with LISTEN/NOTIFY
Declarative table partitioning
Native support for UUID and other web-friendly identifiers
Change data capture for streaming database changes
Scalability Options
Table partitioning for horizontal scaling
Connection pooling with pgBouncer
Built-in connection pooling in PostgreSQL 14+
Sharding frameworks for distributed databases
High-availability clusters with automatic failover
Performance Optimization
Just-in-time (JIT) compilation of queries
Advanced indexing options (B-tree, GiST, SP-GiST, GIN, BRIN)
Intelligent autovacuum for maintenance
Sophisticated statistics collection for query planning
Incremental sorting and aggregation