What is PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database management system and the foundation of the Postgres Plus product suite. It has been in development for more than 20 years and has a strong reputation for excellent architecture and world-class reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX, and Windows. It is fully ACID-compliant and supports foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, stored procedures (in multiple languages), and most SQL92 and SQL99 data types. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, and video. PostgreSQL includes native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, and others, and it is exceptionally well-documented.

An enterprise-class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features, such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point-in-time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write-ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multi-byte character encodings, and Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. PostgreSQL is highly scalable, both in the quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. For more information about PostgreSQL visit www.postgresql.org.