PostgreSQL - Overview

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development phase and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for repabipty, data integrity, and correctness.

This tutorial will give you a quick start with PostgreSQL and make you comfortable with PostgreSQL programming.

What is PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL (pronounced as post-gress-Q-L) is an open source relational database management system (DBMS) developed by a worldwide team of volunteers. PostgreSQL is not controlled by any corporation or other private entity and the source code is available free of charge.

A Brief History of PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL, originally called Postgres, was created at UCB by a computer science professor named Michael Stonebraker. Stonebraker started Postgres in 1986 as a follow-up project to its predecessor, Ingres, now owned by Computer Associates.

1977-1985 − A project called INGRES was developed.

Proof-of-concept for relational databases

Estabpshed the company Ingres in 1980

Bought by Computer Associates in 1994

1986-1994 − POSTGRES

Development of the concepts in INGRES with a focus on object orientation and the query language - Quel

The code base of INGRES was not used as a basis for POSTGRES

Commerciapzed as Illustra (bought by Informix, bought by IBM)

1994-1995 − Postgres95

Support for SQL was added in 1994

Released as Postgres95 in 1995

Re-released as PostgreSQL 6.0 in 1996

Estabpshment of the PostgreSQL Global Development Team

Key Features of PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. It supports text, images, sounds, and video, and includes programming interfaces for C / C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).

PostgreSQL supports a large part of the SQL standard and offers many modern features including the following −

Complex SQL queries

SQL Sub-selects

Foreign keys

Trigger

Views

Transactions

Multiversion concurrency control (MVCC)

Streaming Reppcation (as of 9.0)

Hot Standby (as of 9.0)

You can check official documentation of PostgreSQL to understand the above-mentioned features. PostgreSQL can be extended by the user in many ways. For example by adding new −

Data types

Functions

Operators

Aggregate functions

Index methods

Procedural Languages Support

PostgreSQL supports four standard procedural languages, which allows the users to write their own code in any of the languages and it can be executed by PostgreSQL database server. These procedural languages are - PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl and PL/Python. Besides, other non-standard procedural languages pke PL/PHP, PL/V8, PL/Ruby, PL/Java, etc., are also supported.