PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) based on POSTGRES, Version 4.2, developed at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department. POSTGRES pioneered many concepts that only became available in some commercial database systems much later.

As explained by DuckDB Lab's Hannes Muhleisen in the explainer blog post:

PostgreSQL is designed for traditional transactional use cases, "OLTP", where rows in tables are created, updated and removed concurrently, and it excels at this. But this design decision makes PostgreSQL far less suitable for analytical use cases, "OLAP", where large chunks of tables are read to create summaries of the stored data. Yet there are many use cases where both transactional and analytical use cases are important, for example when trying to gain the latest business intelligence insights into transactional data.

MotherDuck supports two PostgreSQL-native ways interact with the database:

• The postgres scanner extension for DuckDB
• pg_duckdb, a PostgreSQL extension for reading data from Postgres.