PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows.

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, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation.

Advantages:

PostgreSQL offers many advantages for your company or business over other database systems.
Immunity to over-deployment

Over-deployment is what some proprietary database vendors regard as their #1 licence compliance problem. With PostgreSQL, no-one can sue you for breaking licensing agreements, as there is no associated licensing cost for the software.

This has several additional advantages:

* More profitable business models with wide-scale deployment.
* No possibility of being audited for license compliance at any stage.
* Flexibility to do concept research and trial deployments without needing to include additional licensing costs.

Better support than the proprietary vendors

In addition to our strong support offerings, we have a vibrant community of PostgreSQL professionals and enthusiasts that your staff can draw upon and contribute to.

Significant saving on staffing costs

Our software has been designed and created to have much lower maintenance and tuning requirements than the leading proprietary databases, yet still retain all of the features, stability, and performance.

In addition to this, our training programs are generally regarded as being far more cost effective, manageable, and practical in the real world than that of the leading proprietary database vendors.

Legendary reliability and stability

Unlike many proprietary databases, it is extremely common for companies to report that PostgreSQL has never, ever crashed for them in several years of high activity operation. Not even once. It just works.

Extensible

The source code is available to all at no charge. If your staff have a need to customise or extend PostgreSQL in any way then they are able to do so with a minimum of effort, and with no attached costs. This is complemented by the community of PostgreSQL professionals and enthusiasts around the globe that also actively extend PostgreSQL on a daily basis.

Cross platform

PostgreSQL is available for almost every brand of Unix (34 platforms with the latest stable release), and Windows compatibility is available via the Cygwin framework. Native Windows compatibility is also available with version 8.0 and above.

Technical Features

* Fully ACID compliant.
* ANSI SQL compliant.
* Referential Integrity.
* Replication (non-commercial and commercial solutions) allowing the duplication of the master database to multiple slave machines.
* Native interfaces for ODBC, JDBC, .Net, C, C++, PHP, Perl, TCL, ECPG, Python, and Ruby.
* Rules.
* Views.
* Triggers.
* Unicode.
* Sequences.
* Inheritance.
* Outer Joins.
* Sub-selects.
* An open API.
* Stored Procedures.
* Native SSL support.
* Procedural languages.
* Hot stand-by (commercial solutions).
* Better than row-level locking.
* Functional and Partial indexes.
* Native Kerberos authentication.
* Support for UNION, UNION ALL and EXCEPT queries.
* Loadable extensions offering SHA1, MD5, XML, and other functionality.