Thanks for your reply. At least I now know what to keep in mind when I'm in similar situations.

You mentioned arguments over normalization with your devs, but didn't say what side you were on. I develop both applications and the databases they use, and have had to get fellow developers to see the benefits of and understand how to work with joins and normalized data. Although I usually push normalization, sometimes, when practical performance issues arise, I have had to back off and deal with partially denormalized schemas.

One thing I have discovered is that functions can be very useful in simplifying queries, and equivalent functions can be written, with some accounting for language differences, for both SQL Server and PostgreSQL. I've noticed that a query written with a simplifying function executes the same way in SQL Server as a query without the simplifying function, but have not tested that behavior in PostgreSQL.