PostgreSQL, also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) that emphasizes extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the Ingres database developed at the University of California, Berkeley. PostgreSQL supports both SQL (relational) and JSON (non-relational) querying. It is designed to handle a range of workloads, from single machines to data warehouses or web services with many concurrent users. PostgreSQL features transactions with atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability (ACID) properties, automatically updatable views, materialized views, triggers, foreign keys, and stored procedures.
PostgreSQL is a highly stable database management system, backed by more than 20 years of community development which has contributed to its high levels of resilience, integrity, and correctness. It is used as the primary data store or data warehouse for many web, mobile, geospatial, and analytics applications. PostgreSQL is also supported by Amazon Web Services through a fully managed database service with Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) .
PostgreSQL has a rich history for support of advanced data types, and supports a level of performance optimization that is common across its commercial database counterparts, like Oracle and SQL Server. PostgreSQL runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX, and Windows. It supports text, images, sounds, and video, and includes programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) .
