Preface

Table of Contents

1.1. What is PostgreSQL?
1.2. A Brief History of PostgreSQL
1.2.1. The Berkeley POSTGRES Project
1.2.2. Postgres95
1.2.3. PostgreSQL
1.3. Conventions
1.4. Further Information
1.5. Bug Reporting Guidelines
1.5.1. Identifying Bugs
1.5.2. What to report
1.5.3. Where to report bugs

This book is the official documentation of PostgreSQL. It is being written by the PostgreSQL developers and other volunteers in parallel to the development of the PostgreSQL software. It describes all the functionality that the current version of PostgreSQL officially supports.

To make the large amount of information about PostgreSQL manageable, this book has been organized in several parts. Each part is targeted at a different class of users, or at users in different stages of their PostgreSQL experience:

1.1.  What is 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. POSTGRES pioneered many concepts that only became available in some commercial database systems much later.

PostgreSQL is an open-source descendant of this original Berkeley code. It supports a large part of the SQL standard and offers many modern features:

  • complex queries
  • foreign keys
  • triggers
  • views
  • transactional integrity
  • multiversion concurrency control

Also, 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

And because of the liberal license, PostgreSQL can be used, modified, and distributed by everyone free of charge for any purpose, be it private, commercial, or academic.