A detailed comparison of PostgreSQL and Microsoft's T-SQL for SSMS

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A detailed comparison of PostgreSQL and Microsoft's T-SQL for SSMS Part one of a four-part series of blogs
Even though Microsoft's SQL Server Management Studio and PostgreSQL use the same underying language (SQL), the user interface and dialects are quite different at times, as this blog explains. A detailed comparison of PostgreSQL and Microsoft's T-SQL for SSMS (this blog) Things which SSMS and/or T-SQL does better Things which Postgres does better than SSMS / T-SQL Things which are just different between PostgreSQL and T-SQL / SSMS

A detailed comparison of PostgreSQL and Microsoft's T-SQL for SSMS

Part one of a four-part series of blogs

Even though Microsoft's SQL Server Management Studio and PostgreSQL use the same underying language (SQL), the user interface and dialects are quite different at times, as this blog explains.

A detailed comparison of PostgreSQL and Microsoft's T-SQL for SSMS (this blog)
Things which SSMS and/or T-SQL does better
Things which Postgres does better than SSMS / T-SQL
Things which are just different between PostgreSQL and T-SQL / SSMS

Posted by Andy Brown on 06 March 2026

Having just created our two-day Introduction to PostgreSQL course, I thought I'd list in this blog all of the differences I've found between writing Transact SQL or T-SQL in Microsoft's SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and writing PostgreSQL in PG Admin (I did something recently for Snowflake and T-SQL):

PostgreSQL (left) and T-SQL (right) look pretty much identical, but there are a surprising number of differences when you start comparing them.

I've divided the differences into 3 parts, to make this blog more digestible:

Part	Notes
Things which I think T-SQL / SSMS does better	These are mainly to do with the fact that you can design queries, views and databases visually in SSMS.
Things which I think PostgreSQL does better	The PostgreSQL implementation of SQL is often simpler to use, and has a number of useful extensions that T-SQL lacks.
Things which are just differences!	There are lots of things which are not necesssarily better or worse, but just different!

One obvious difference between the two dialects of SQL is that the vast majority of people will write T-SQL and PostgreSQL in different interfaces (SMMS and PG Admin respectively):

PG Admin (top) and SSMS (bottom) compared).

These user interfaces are clearly completely different, and I've only included them in this blog to the extent that the differences between them make it easier or harder to write SQL.

Parts of this blog
A detailed comparison of PostgreSQL and Microsoft's T-SQL for SSMS (this blog) Things which SSMS and/or T-SQL does better Things which Postgres does better than SSMS / T-SQL Things which are just different between PostgreSQL and T-SQL / SSMS

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