PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation.
An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as the Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead log for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and in is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting.
It is highly scalable both in sheer quantity of data it can manage and and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data. Some general PostgreSQL limits are included in the table below.
