PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS)
based on POSTGRES, Version 4.2,
developed at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science
Department.
It has
more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that
has
earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and
correctness. It is the most feature-rich robust open-source
database.
PostgreSQL runs stored procedures in more than a dozen
programming
languages, including Java, Perl,
Python,
Ruby, Tcl, C/C++, and its own
PL/pgSQL, which is similar to Oracle's PL/SQL.
There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments
that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data.
It was the winner of the 2005 and 2006 Linux Journal Editors' Choice
Awards for Best Database
It supports a large part of the SQL standard and offers many
modern
features:
- Sophisticated query planner/optimizer
- Fully ACID compliant
- ANSI SQL compliant - Support for UNION, UNION ALL
and EXCEPT queries
- Referential Integrity
- Transactional integrity
- Replication (non-commercial and commercial solutions)
allowing the
duplication of the master database to multiple slave machines
- Native interfaces for ODBC, JDBC, .Net, C, C++, PHP, Perl,
TCL, ECPG, Python,
and Ruby
- Rules - allow the "query tree" of an incoming
query to be rewritten
- Views
- Triggers - events triggered by the action of SQL
query
- Sequences
- Inheritance
- Outer Joins
- Sub-selects
- An open API
- Stored Procedures
- Native SSL support
- Procedural languages
- Hot stand-by (commercial solutions)
- Better than row-level locking
- Functional and Partial indexes
- Native Kerberos authentication
- Loadable extensions offering SHA1, MD5, XML, and other
functionality
- Tools for generating portable SQL to share with other
SQL-compliant systems
- Extensible data type system providing for custom,
user-defined datatypes and rapid development of new datatypes
- Cross-database compatibility functions for easing the
transition from other, less SQL-compliant RDBMS
- Foreign keys
- Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) which gives each
user a "snapshot" of the database
- Point in time recovery
- Tablespaces
- Asynchronous replication
- Nested transactions (savepoints)
- Online/hot backups
- Write ahead logging
for fault tolerance
- Supports international character sets, multibyte
character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting,
case-sensitivity, and formatting
- Highly scalable both in the sheer quantity
of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can
accommodate
Last Updated Friday, April 25 2008 @ 07:29 PM EDT
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