PostGres Consulting

Did you know PostGres is the fastest growing relational database that is not only free and open source, but rivals the performance of paid RDBMS databases like Oracle and SQL Server? It is no surprise that PostGres has consistently ranked as one of the top four relational databases by multiple credible research studies comparing database engines. Databases play a crucial role in today's digital world. In the world of polyglot persistence (different data stores for different kinds of data), Relational Databases are an integral component. Given the ACID guarantees they are still the No. 1 choice for data that is important to an organization. Modern relational databases provide much more than just storing and retrieving data. With leading databases providing analysis, security, partitioning features by default apart from the simplicity and ease of access, most relational databases provide other features such as data integrity and normalization.

PostgreSQL is one of the open source object-relational database softwares, which has seen great acceptance in the industry. With a backing of an extremely strong community and its contribution for more than 25 years, PostgreSQL has turned into a powerful, robust and mature database management software over the years.

At Cazton, we understand your data requirements and our team of expert database administrators, big data architects, ML experts, data scientists, data analysts, developers and consultants are here to help you. Be it SQL, NoSQL or Search, Cloud or On-prem, our experts can help resolve all your data related problems. Continue reading to learn more about our PostgreSQL consulting and training services.

What is PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL, also known as Postgres is a free and open-source object-relational database management system that supports both SQL (relational) and JSON (non-relational) querying. It is released under the PostgreSQL license, a liberal open source license, similar to the BSD or MIT licenses, which means you will not have license problems in your commercial applications. Postgres offers many features such as: complex queries, foreign keys, triggers, updatable views, transactional integrity and multiversion concurrency control. It can be extended by users by adding new data types, functions, operators, aggregate functions, index methods and procedural languages. It has always been known for its conformance to the SQL standard and with recent versions of the database it has only gotten better. Features such as internationalization, robust authentication and easy administration make Postgres a strong contender for enterprise storage needs.

Postgres can be installed on-prem and cloud. Many major cloud providers like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and others offer managed cloud Postgres solutions at cost effective rates. These cloud services allow you to create Postgres database instances while they take care of scalability, backup and high availability of your databases. Postgres has received a lot of attention over the years and developers love it because of its flexibility and ease of use. It allows developers to use Postgres as a database for small to enterprise-level applications written in Java, C++, C, C#, PHP, Python and other programming languages.

Features of PostgreSQL

• ORDBMS: Unlike other open source DBMS softwares, PostgreSQL is an object relational database management software that offers the best of both the relational database model and object oriented model. It offers direct support for object oriented features like objects, classes and inheritance and let it apply directly for data management.
• Support for many data types: PostgreSQL offers support to a wide variety of data types including but not limited to boolean, characters, date/time, enums, money, composite, array, XML supporting XPath queries, JSON, JSONB and more. Users can also create custom data types that can be indexed using advanced techniques. This is one of the many reasons why developers prefer using PostgreSQL over other open source databases.
• Multi-version concurrency control: This is a very important feature provided by PostgreSQL. At times, where data can be updated concurrently from multiple sources, this database engine offers a snapshot of the data to every transaction allowing changes to be made without affecting other transactions. Postgres maintains data consistency by using a multiversion model which ultimately helps users to see consistent data.
• ACID Compliance: PostgreSQL is fully ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) compliant as it maintains the integrity of data at transactional level and safeguards it from corruption. If multiple concurrent write requests are fired, either all of them will succeed or fail. No constraints will be violated and any deadlocks (if occurred) will be resolved as transactions will lock out each other. After the transaction is committed, no system crash will occur as transaction logs are preserved.
• Data Replication: It offers a built-in binary replication which writes data to replica nodes asynchronously. When multiple read requests are received, they are split and spread across multiple nodes to process them efficiently. It also includes synchronous replication where the master node ensures that a write-request is written to at least one replica node for data integrity.
• Solid Community Backing: PostgreSQL has been backed with a very strong community, which has been adding features to this database engine for more than 25 years. It has turned into a powerful, robust and mature database management software over the years. With that said, PostGreSQL v12.2, released in February 2020, shows that its community is still active and working hard to enhance this software.
• Interfaces: PostgreSQL has a solid community backup as mentioned above and several built-in and external interfaces are available for developers. It also supports a wide variety of object oriented and procedural programming languages.

There are many more features that PostgreSQL has to offer. It has become the most favorite open source object relational database for small to enterprise application developers. And to facilitate a cloud service for this database engine, many companies have come forward to offer commercial PostgreSQL cloud services at affordable rates. Continue reading to learn about some of the top cloud service providers and what services they offer for PostgreSQL.

Presentation by the CEO of Cazton @ Microsoft TechEd Conference

Microsoft Azure for PostgreSQL

Microsoft Azure is one of the top cloud services in the world. Microsoft provides many different services under Azure. We have a separate article that talks about different Azure services and how we offer our Azure consulting and training services. When it comes to relational databases, SQL Server is one of the top DBMS softwares in the industry. Similarly PostgreSQL has become the favorite of many start-ups and large organizations. With Azure, Microsoft offers its cloud database as a service called Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

Microsoft offers a fully managed and intelligent Azure Database for PostgreSQL that lets you focus on your business requirements rather than database management. If you have lots of data, worry not as Azure Database for PostgreSQL lets you scale compute, memory, and storage independently and you pay as per your usage making it an extremely affordable cloud option. It offers services like performance recommendations based on your database characteristics, robust security, high availability and dynamic scalability. Azure Database for PostgreSQL is also available as a Hyperscale (Citus) cluster, which horizontally scales queries across multiple machines using sharding. It is also developer friendly as it offers many open source tools and extensions to build or migrate database workloads.

Google Cloud for PostgreSQL

Google Cloud offers Cloud SQL, which is a cloud relational database for MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL. It offers features like automatic backups, data replication and failover, database reliability, high availability and flexibility and great performance. It also automates database provisioning, storage capacity management, and other time-consuming tasks.

Google offers a fully managed PostgreSQL database in the cloud, based on the Cloud SQL second generation platform. It supports multiple versions of PostgreSQL. Google Cloud is huge where it offers up to 416 GB of RAM and 64 CPUs and 30TB of available storage, with the ability to increase storage size. PostgreSQL Cloud instances can be easily managed using Google Cloud Console and those instances can be created across the world including US, EU, Asia and Australia. Google offers security by encrypting data in its internal networks, database tables, temporary files, and backups. Users can connect from external sources to PostgreSQL instances through Cloud SQL proxy and with SSL/TLS protocol.

Additional features include exporting and importing databases using SQL dump files, automatic failover by data replication between multiple zones, automated and on-demand backups, support for PostgreSQL client-server protocol and standard PostgreSQL connectors and more. Google Cloud's - Cloud SQL is one of the highly rated Platform as a Service.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

Amazon AWS has been one of the most booming cloud service providers in the industry. And they have come up with their own service called the RDS - Relation Database Service which makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS provides six database engines to choose from, including Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, and SQL Server. It provides features to automate database administration tasks, scale databases as per our needs, migrate or replicate your existing databases to Amazon RDS and more.

With Amazon RDS, we can easily set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. It offers features like push-button scaling, upgrading PostgreSQL software, managing storage, replicating data for high availability and offering automatic backup plans for disaster recovery. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is for companies who wish to leverage the full capabilities of this database software in a cloud-based environment. It supports features like PostGIS, Full Text Search Dictionaries, HStore, JSON Data Types, pg_stat_statements, Foreign data wrappers and more.

There are many other third party cloud providers available in the industry. The services they offer may differ by features and pricing. Things can get complex if you are new to cloud based services. At Cazton, we have experts who have worked extensively with many cloud based services including the ones mentioned above. We have the expertise to help you setup your PostgreSQL infrastructure on-prem and cloud and help you solve your data related problems.

If you read our article on comparison between SQL & NoSQL databases, you might have quickly noticed the variety of database technologies we have in the industry. Over the years, we have seen the trend shifting towards NoSQL databases, but with a legacy of over two decades, a majority of companies tend to stick with SQL databases. When compared with other open source database engines, PostgreSQL has received a lot of attention and interest in the industry. Developers love using PostgreSQL because it offers many features, which are available in commercial DBMS softwares but not yet available in other open source softwares.

How can Cazton help you with Postgres Consulting, Training and Maintenance?

At Cazton, our team of expert developers, consultants, architects, data analysts, data scientists, DBAs, awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals and Google Developer Experts understand the changing requirements and demands of the industry. Depending on the type, structure, data model and intended use-case of the data, different types of systems will suit different needs.

Our experts are well versed with all versions of PostgreSQL. Be it on-prem or cloud we have the expertise to help you setup your database infrastructure, tackle any database issues, improve database performance, help set up a scale-out architecture, help with data recovery, hardware and PostgreSQL server upgrades, migrate your on-prem databases to Azure AWS, GCP or other cloud service, provide custom PostgreSQL server training, offer consulting to implement best practices for managing your PostgreSQL databases and more. We help you make the right decision to achieve your business goals. We have the expertise to understand your requirements and tackle your data problems. Learn more about database, cloud, big data, artificial intelligence and other consulting and training services.