The biggest case almost completely unhandled by PostgreSQL is if you need a clustered index like in MySQL. There are basically two common ways of organizing row

The biggest case almost completely unhandled by PostgreSQL is if you need a clustered index like in MySQL. There are basically two common ways of organizing rows in a database: store everything in a tree according to the primary key, or store everything in a heap, and have a separate tree relating values to pointers into the heap. MySQL stores rows in a tree, and PostgreSQL stores rows in a heap. The strategy used by PostgreSQL is simpler, more flexible, and cleaner, but there are some cases where MySQL's way of storing things can be significantly faster. There has been talk of PostgreSQL supporting clustered indexes, but that would probably require reimplementing a ton of stuff to support both storage formats efficiently. Also, it turns out that there are a bunch of ways in which PostgreSQL can cheat such that in most workloads there's no difference at all - though not all of these cheats have been implemented. Note that I didn't say MySQL is faster or slower than PostgreSQL. Such statements don't make sense, because it depends entirely on your workload, and as long as you aren't literally using PostgreSQL as a key/value store instead of a relational database, you can probably always find a way to make it as fast as necessary.