afterword
I started using PostgreSQL in 2008 while working on a logistics enterprise application. That was the first time I used an open source database system, as previously I had been using only Oracle and SQL Server, which were very popular options at the time.
However, right from the start, I was surprised by the abundance of advanced features that Postgres 8.3 offered at the time, such as arrays, enum types, full-text search and GIN indexes, geometric types and GiST indexes, multivalue inserts, and NOWAIT, to name a few.
At the time, I was operating in the outsourcing business, and for this reason, I got the chance to work on many Java-based enterprise applications. They all had one thing in common: they all used Postgres, and for a very good reason. Not only did Postgres offer advanced features that you couldn’t find in commercial database systems, but every new release gave us more reasons to consider using it for our next big project.
In 2011, we were working on a project that needed to process some JSON documents from external suppliers. While we were parsing the JSON documents to store the data in relational tables, we also needed to store the original JSON document to backtrack a given value that the external provider was questioning.