Introduction to PostgreSQL Features
PostgreSQL supports tremendous features that will make things easier. Some of the features are widely appreciated as they are incredibly useful. The following section contains some of the well-known features of PostgreSQL that you should look at as they will help you to improve performance in production and will make operations easier.
Features of PostgreSQL
Features provided by PostgreSQL are:
- The multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) feature is implemented by PostgreSQL at the very first. In Oracle, the multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) feature is termed as snapshot isolation.
- PostgreSQL is one of the advanced open-source databases, It offers many advantages for your company or business over other database systems. PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system.
- Users can participate in the PostgreSQL community to post and share knowledge, doubts, and bugs. Users can develop or propose new modules to its community as its open-source database management system.
- PostgreSQL has a wide variety of communities. Because of its own global community and various kinds of people, the development possibility is very high.
- PostgreSQL supports various programming languages such as s C/C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and Tcl, etc which allows us to develop different custom functions.
- SQL functions called ‘Stored Procedure’ can be used for a server environment.
- PostgreSQL supports following standard procedural languages,
- PL/pgSQL
- PL/Tcl
- PL/Perl
- PL/Python
- Extensibility is one of the key features of PostgreSQL. In PostgreSQL, we can create our own functional languages, data types, index types, etc.
- If the user wants to enhance the part of the system then they can easily write a custom plugin to meet their requirements.
- PostgreSQL has a very big active community to support various kinds of queries. Anyone can easily find the answers to the issues with PostgreSQL from the PostgreSQL’s community.
- If anyone needs so many companies to offer PostgreSQL commercial support services.
- PostgreSQL runs on various operating systems, like Windows, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Linux, etc. PostgreSQL is available for almost every operating system with the latest stable release.
- PostgreSQL supports different storage like text, images, sounds, and videos, etc.
- Users can run different web apps and dynamic websites as a LAMP stack option using PostgreSQL.
- PostgreSQL is a highly fault-tolerant database because of its write-ahead logging mechanism.
- As of PostgreSQL available under open source license its source code is freely available. Which allows user to use freely, modify, and implement it as per their business needs.
- In geospatial data stores for location-based services and geographic information systems, we can use PostgreSQL as it supports geographic objects.
- PostgresSQL is very easy to learn, users don’t need to go through rigorous training in order to use it.
- For embedded and enterprise PostgreSQL uses low maintenance administration
- Users can write and execute their own code on the PostgreSQL database server using the above standard procedural languages and it can be executed by These procedural languages.PostgreSQL supports the following non-standard procedural languages as well.
- PL/PHP
- PL/V8
- PL/Ruby
- PL/Java
- PostgreSQL can be extended in various ways. Users can add the following new features.
- Data types
- Functions
- Operators
- Aggregate functions
- Index methods
- PostgreSQL supports a huge set of the SQL standard and offers various modern features. Similar to the various enterprise database management system the PostgreSQL offers advanced features, such as:
- User-defined types
- Table inheritance
- Sophisticated locking mechanism
- Foreign key referential integrity
- Views, rules, subquery
- Nested transactions (savepoints)
- Asynchronous replication
- Complex SQL queries
- SQL Sub-selects
- Transactions
- Multiversion concurrency control (MVCC)
- Streaming Replication (as of 9.0)
- Hot Standby (as of 9.0)
- PostgreSQL is compatible with many platforms with the help of various programming languages and middleware.
- It offers a most sophisticated locking mechanism
- Support for multi-version concurrency control
- Mature Server-Side Programming Functionality
- Compliant with the ANSI SQL standard
- Full support for client-server network architecture
- Log-based and trigger-based replication SSL
- Standby server and high availability
- Object-oriented and ANSI-SQL2008 compatible
- PostgreSQL support for JSON, with the help of JSON the linking with other data stores like NoSQL, is possible as it acts as a federated hub for polyglot databases.
- PostgreSQL supports different geographic data storage techniques:
- PostGIS,
- Key-Value Store,
- DBLink
- Postgre SQL supports ACID and Transaction
- PostgreSQL supports ACID(Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability).
- The transaction is a very small unit of a program and it may perform various low-level tasks.
- In order to maintain accuracy, completeness, and data integrity, the transaction in a database system must be ACID which means it should maintain Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability.
- PostgreSQL supports various techniques of indexing.
- Other than B+ tree index techniques the PostgreSQL provides various kinds of techniques.
- GIN(Generalized Inverted Index), and GiST(Generalized Search Tree), are indexing techniques supported by PostgreSQL.
- PostgreSQL supports a flexible search for full-text.
- In order to search strings, a full-text search is available with the execution of vector manipulation and string search.
- PostgreSQL supports replication with different types.
- PostgreSQL supports various replication methods,
- Streaming Replication,
- Slony-I,
- Cascading,
- Following features are also supported by the latest PostgreSQL:
- Native Microsoft Windows Server version
- Tablespaces
- Point-in-time recovery
- PostgreSQL supports various replication methods,
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This is a guide to PostgreSQL Features. Here we discuss the Introduction and Various Features of PostgreSQL. You may also look at the following articles to learn more –
