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, 10.0, 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 9.x and 10.x 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 (your preference really should be to deploy version 8.3 or later).
PostgreSQL works well in many common database applications, but certainly there are applications it's not the best choice for.
Not everything you need to manage and optimize a PostgreSQL server will be included in a basic install. Be prepared to include an additional number of utilities that add features outside of what the core database aims to provide.
Performance tuning is best approached as a systematic, carefully measured practice.
In the following chapter, we will discuss the hardware best-suited for the
PostgreSQL server.