PostgreSQL is a highly-scalable, SQL compliant, open source object-relational database management system. With more than 15 years of development history, it is quickly becoming the de facto database for enterprise level open source solutions.

What’s New?

• Win32 Native Server
  This is the first PostgreSQL release to natively run on Microsoft Windows as a server. It can run as a Windows service. This release supports NT-based Windows releases like Win2000, XP, Win2003. Older releases like Windows 95, 98, and ME are not supported because these operating systems do not have the infrastructure to support PostgreSQL. A separate installer project has been created to ease installation on Windows: http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller.

  Although tested throughout our release cycle, the Windows port does not have the benefit of years of use in production environments that PostgreSQL has on Unix platforms and therefore should be treated with the same level of caution as you would a new product.

  Previous releases required the Unix emulation toolkit Cygwin for Win32 server support. PostgreSQL has always supported clients on Win32.

• More new features…

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 SQL92 and SQL99 and offers many modern features:

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

Additionally, 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.

The Official PostgreSQL Website

Tags: dev

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2005 at 15:05 and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.