Personally, I try to understand at least conceptually how the underlying data store connects and serializes the data in question. I'm not a fan of ORM tooling, quite frankly and find it often gets in the way more than helps.

I tend to track versioned changes in scripts, with a config table with a lock and a record of which the current version is, locking and upgrading the db on api service startup. It tends to be very solid, and doesn't rely on potentially unexpected behaviors. At work, a project I'm on uses SQL Server projects which has had a great many issues tracking versions. I've also used several ORM tools across differing platforms and they all have issues. More often than not, I'd rather do things the "hard" way. It's a little more initial effort, but saves in the long run.

Beyond this, without understanding how the data is persisted, it's hard to compare equally. If you used pgsql how you used Redis, I'd be surprised if it was more than 5x as slow. There's also less risk of data loss with PostgreSQL. In this case, data caching foreign api results, Redis is probably the more appropriate tool anyway, but the comparisons in TFA are muddy at best.