TL;DR: if you don’t know what your needs will be, build upon PostgreSQL. And, if you know and you pick another DB, think twice.
At CARTO you get to love PostgreSQL. It’s powerful, versatile and open source. It’s great as a pure, old-fashioned RDBMS, but it’s also open through extensions (PostGIS FTW) and it gets better with every version.
There are many useful less-known features that make PostgreSQL a true swiss army knife for software development. My hypothesis is that if we knew more about it, many other tools just wouldn’t exist, or would be constrained to more specific needs.
So, I turned 2017 into my “Year of the Elephant”, prepared some slides and talked about it at From The Trenches Donosti ‘17 and Socracan ‘17, and I’ll close the year next Saturday at Cylicon Valley. Most of the content is really basic if you’ve spent just a few weeks working with PostgreSQL, but many people found it useful, so here you have!
Enjoy!
PS: there’s a video from From The Trenches: