What is PostgreSQL? Features, Advantages and History?

What is the PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL is a object-relational database Management system. PostgreSQL is free and open source software. Its source code is available under PostgreSQL license, a liberal open source license. You are free to use, modify and distribute PostgreSQL in any form.

PostgreSQL supports advanced data types and advance performance optimization, features only available in the expensive commercial database, like Oracle and SQL Server. It supports both SQL for relational and JSON for non-relational queries.

PostgreSQL Features:

  1. User-defined types
  2. Table inheritance
  3. Locking mechanism
  4. Foreign key referential integrity
  5. Views, rules, sub query
  6. Auto Commit & Nested transactions (savepoints)
  7. Multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)
  8. Asynchronous and Synchronous replication
  9. Tablespaces
  10. Point-in-time recovery

PostgreSQL Advantages:

Open Source DBMS

Only PostgreSQL provides enterprise-class performance and functions among current Open Source DBMS with no end of development possibilities. Also, PostgreSQL users can directly participate in the community and post and share inconveniences and bugs.

Diverse Community

One of the characteristics of PostgreSQL is that there are a wide variety of communities. Regarding PostgreSQL as Open Source DBMS, users themselves can develop modules and propose the module to the community. The development possibility is superiorly high with collecting opinions from its own global community organized with all different kinds of people. Collective Intelligence, as some might call it, facilitates transmission of indigenous knowledge greatly within the communities.

Function

SQL functions called ‘Store Procedure’ can be used for server environment. Also, we support languages similar to PL/SQL in Oracle such as PL/pgSQL, PL/Python, PL/Perl, C/C++, and PL/R.

ACID and Transaction

PostgreSQL support ACID(Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability).

Diverse indexing techniques

PostgreSQL not only provides B+ tree index techniques, but various kinds of techniques such as GIN(Generalized Inverted Index), and GiST(Generalized Search Tree), etc as well.

Flexible Full-text search

Full-text search is available when searching for strings with execution of vector operation and string search.

Diverse kinds of replication

PostgreSQL supports a variety of replication methods such as Streaming Replication , Slony-I, and cascading.

Diversified extension functions

PostgreSQL supports different kinds of techniques for geographic data storage such as PostGIS, Key-Value Store, and DB Link.

History of PostgreSQL:

PostgreSQL was created at UCB (University of California at Berkeley) by a computer science professor named Michael Stonebraker. It was originally called Postgres.

It was started in 1986 by professor stonebreaker as a follow-up project and a post Ingres project to overcome with the problems of contemporary database system.

1977-1985: A project called INGRES was developed
1986-1994: POSTGRES
1994-1995: Postgres95
PostgreSQL 6.0 in 1996

Currently Supported Versions:

Version

Current minor

Supported

First Release

Final Release

17

17.4

Yes

September 26, 2024

November 8, 2029

16

16.8

Yes

September 14, 2023

November 9, 2028

15

15.12

Yes

October 13, 2022

November 11, 2027

14

14.17

Yes

September 30, 2021

November 12, 2026

13

13.2

Yes

September 24, 2020

November 13, 2025

 Check PostgreSQL Server Versions History

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