Next year I really need to switch from MSSQL to Postgres. The work that the Postgres team have done in the last 2-3 years is really amazing.
They are also clearly reaping the benefits of some very smart architectural decisions, and that gives me the confidence that they will be able to continue innovating in the coming years.
There is actually a lot of overlap in the feature set. When I moved from MSSQL to a gig that was all Postgres it was fairly smooth to do so, the main differences being OS related. Thus you don't need to switch over entirely to add a useful tool to the toolbox.
MSSQL has some advantages in parallel query execution and data warehousing enhancements - if you can afford the licensing for the latter. The other view on that is you can tip up as many Postgres production instances as you have hardware for without impacting the software budget.
That's close to what I'm doing, except running FreeBSD 10.1 in Hyper-V. It's actually pretty easy to set up since FBSD 10.1 is available for download as a VHD. Just need to specify the VHD image file as the disk to attach when creating a new HV VM.
It's somewhat more fun/challenging to configure network access for the VM. Once that's done it's very handy for developing web servers/apps. With the web server running in the VM, the client/browser on the host points to the VM just like any remote site. PostgreSQL in the VM performs quite well.
IMO this kind of development is much more satisfactory in a unix environment than under Windows and Hyper-V provides a convenient way to get there.
They are also clearly reaping the benefits of some very smart architectural decisions, and that gives me the confidence that they will be able to continue innovating in the coming years.