This part of the book explores what makes PostgreSQL one of a kind: its ecosystem of extensions and Postgres-compatible solutions. The motto “Just use Postgres!” emerged largely because of this rich extension ecosystem, which lets us use the database well beyond the scenarios covered earlier in the book.
We start with a quick overview of the Postgres extension ecosystem and learn how to install and use extensions. From there, we dive into three that are widely used: pgvector for generative AI and similarity search, TimescaleDB for time-series data, and PostGIS for geospatial applications. Finally, we explore how to implement message queues directly in Postgres, either from scratch using built-in capabilities or with the pgmq extension. After finishing this part of the book, we’ll be ready to take advantage of the Postgres extensions ecosystem to design and build applications that handle generative AI, time-series, geospatial, and other types of workloads.