The “most advanced open source database” just got more advanced. More than a year in the making, the latest release of PostgreSQL is the work of an entirely decentralized, global, and staunchly independent community that values innovation, pragmatism, and novelty as equals. PostgreSQL 7.4 has a host of performance improvements and a panoply of new database programming features for databases of all sizes. The new PostgreSQL is extensible, flexible, and clever. If you thought MySQL was the only game in town, think again.
Since the POSTGRES project was incepted in 1986 by Michael Stonebraker’s University of California at Berkeley team, PostgreSQL’s developers have emphasized both implementing the most recent ideas on relational database design and standards and enabling users to perform complex tasks inside the database. Many call PostgreSQL the “database administrator’s database,” because it maximizes the use of SQL, data integrity controls, database procedures, and relational theory to do work inside PostgreSQL instead of in middleware code.
PostgreSQL’s architecture and Object-Relational features make modular extensions of the database functionality easy and accessible, much like Linux and Apache. And like those other open source projects, PostgreSQL has attracted some unique features to solve unique problems.
PostgreSQL 7.4 release is in many ways a “performance release,” with numerous changes designed to speed up queries and ease maintenance and management of large, enterprise databases. However, during the twelve month development and beta testing period, numerous contributors from around the world added new features useful for any size…
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