- Table of Contents
- 1. What
is PostgreSQL?
- 2. A Short History of
PostgreSQL
- 3. What's
In This Book
- 4. Overview of
Documentation Resources
- 5. Terminology and
Notation
- 6. Bug
Reporting Guidelines
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. The POSTGRES
project, led by Professor Michael Stonebraker, was sponsored by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army Research Office (ARO), the National Science Foundation (NSF),
and ESL, Inc.
PostgreSQL is an open-source descendant of this original
Berkeley code. It provides SQL92/SQL99 language support and other modern features.
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POSTGRES pioneered many of the object-relational
concepts now becoming available in some commercial databases. Traditional relational
database management systems (RDBMS) support a data model
consisting of a collection of named relations, containing attributes of a specific type. In
current commercial systems, possible types include floating point numbers, integers,
character strings, money, and dates. It is commonly recognized that this model is inadequate
for future data-processing applications. The relational model successfully replaced previous
models in part because of its "Spartan simplicity".
However, this simplicity makes the implementation of certain applications very difficult. PostgreSQL offers substantial additional power by incorporating
the following additional concepts in such a way that users can easily extend the system:
- inheritance
- data types
- functions
Other features provide additional power and flexibility:
- constraints
- triggers
- rules
- transactional integrity
These features put PostgreSQL into the category of
databases referred to as object-relational. Note that this is
distinct from those referred to as object-oriented, which in
general are not as well suited to supporting traditional relational database languages. So,
although PostgreSQL has some object-oriented features, it
is firmly in the relational database world. In fact, some commercial databases have recently
incorporated features pioneered by PostgreSQL.
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