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-<HTML>
-<HEAD>
- <TITLE>The POSTGRES95 User Manual - Introduction</TITLE>
-</HEAD>
-
-<BODY>
-<font size=-1>
-<A HREF="pg95user.html">[ TOC ]</A>
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-<H1>1. INTRODUCTION</H1>
-<HR>
- This document is the user manual for the
- <A HREF="http://s2k-ftp.cs.berkeley.edu:8000/postgres95/"><B>POSTGRES95</B></A>
- database management system developed at the University
- of California at Berkeley. <B>POSTGRES95</B> is based on
- <A HREF="http://s2k-ftp.CS.Berkeley.EDU:8000/postgres/postgres.html">
- <B>POSTGRES release 4.2</B></A>. The POSTGRES project,
- led by Professor Michael Stonebraker, has been sponsored by the
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the
- Army Research Office (ARO), the National Science
- Foundation (NSF), and ESL, Inc.
-<H2>1.1. What is POSTGRES?</H2>
- Traditional relational database management systems
- (DBMSs) support a data model consisting of a collection
- of named relations, containing attributes of a specific
- type. In current commercial systems, possible types
- include floating point numbers, integers, character
- strings, money, and dates. It is commonly recognized
- that this model is inadequate for future data
- processing applications.
- The relational model successfully replaced previous
- models in part because of its "Spartan simplicity".
- However, as mentioned, this simplicity often makes the
- implementation of certain applications very difficult
- to implement. POSTGRES offers substantial additional
- power by incorporating the following four additional
- basic constructs in such a way that users can easily
- extend the system:
-<p>
-<PRE> classes
- inheritance
- types
- functions
-</PRE><p>
- In addition, POSTGRES supports a powerful production
- rule system.
-
-<H2><A NAME="a-short-history-of-the-postgres-project">1.2. A Short History of the POSTGRES Project</A></H2>
- Implementation of the POSTGRES DBMS began in 1986. The
- initial concepts for the system were presented in
- <A HREF="refs.html#STON86">[STON86]</A> and the definition of the initial data model
- appeared in <A HREF="refs.html#ROW87">[ROWE87]</A>. The design of the rule system at
- that time was described in <A HREF="refs.html#STON87a">[STON87a]</A>. The rationale
- and architecture of the storage manager were detailed
- in <A HREF="refs.html#STON87b">[STON87b]</A>.
- POSTGRES has undergone several major releases since
- then. The first "demoware" system became operational
- in 1987 and was shown at the 1988 <B>ACM-SIGMOD</B>
- Conference. We released Version 1, described in <A HREF="refs.html#STON90a">[STON90a]</A>,
- to a few external users in June 1989. In response to a
- critique of the first rule system <A HREF="refs.html#STON89">[STON89]</A>, the rule
- system was redesigned <A HREF="refs.html#STON90">[STON90b]</A> and Version 2 was
- released in June 1990 with the new rule system.
- Version 3 appeared in 1991 and added support for multiple
- storage managers, an improved query executor, and a
- rewritten rewrite rule system. For the most part,
- releases since then have focused on portability and
- reliability.
- POSTGRES has been used to implement many different
- research and production applications. These include: a
- financial data analysis system, a jet engine
- performance monitoring package, an asteroid tracking
- database, a medical information database, and several
- geographic information systems. POSTGRES has also been
- used as an educational tool at several universities.
- Finally, <A HREF="http://www.illustra.com/">Illustra Information Technologies</A> picked up
- the code and commercialized it.
- POSTGRES became the primary data manager for the
- <A HREF="http://www.sdsc.edu/0/Parts_Collabs/S2K/s2k_home.html">Sequoia 2000</A> scientific computing project in late 1992.
- Furthermore, the size of the external user community
- nearly doubled during 1993. It became increasingly
- obvious that maintenance of the prototype code and
- support was taking up large amounts of time that should
- have been devoted to database research. In an effort
- to reduce this support burden, the project officially
- ended with <B>Version 4.2</B>.
-
-<H2><A NAME="what-is-postgres95">1.3. What is <B>POSTGRES95</B>?</A></H2>
- <B>POSTGRES95</B> is a derivative of the last official release
- of POSTGRES (version 4.2). The code is now completely
- ANSI C and the code size has been trimmed by 25&#37;. There
- are a lot of internal changes that improve performance
- and code maintainability. <B>POSTGRES95</B> runs about 30-50&#37;
- faster on the Wisconsin Benchmark compared to v4.2.
- Apart from bug fixes, these are the major enhancements:
-<UL>
- <LI>The query language <B>POSTQUEL</B> has been replaced with
- <B>SQL</B> (implemented in the server). We do not support
- subqueries (which can be imitated with user defined
- <B>SQL</B> functions) at the moment. Aggregates have been
- re-implemented. We also added support for <B>GROUP BY</B>.
- The <B>libpq</B> interface is still available for <B>C</B>
- programs.
- <LI>In addition to the monitor program, we provide a new
- program (<B>psql</B>) which supports <B>GNU</B> <B>readline</B>.
- <LI>We added a new front-end library, <B>libpgtcl</B>, that
- supports <B>Tcl</B>-based clients. A sample shell,
- pgtclsh, provides new Tcl commands to interface <B>tcl</B>
- programs with the <B>POSTGRES95</B> backend.
- <LI>The large object interface has been overhauled. We
- kept Inversion large objects as the only mechanism
- for storing large objects. (This is not to be
- confused with the Inversion file system which has been
- removed.)
- <LI>The instance-level rule system has been removed.
- <LI>Rules are still available as rewrite rules.
- <LI>A short tutorial introducing regular <B>SQL</B> features as
- well as those of ours is distributed with the source
- code.
- <LI><B>GNU</B> make (instead of <B>BSD</B> make) is used for the
- build. Also, <B>POSTGRES95</B> can be compiled with an
- unpatched <B>gcc</B> (data alignment of doubles has been
- fixed).
-</UL>
-<p>
-<H2><A NAME="about-this-release">1.4. About This Release</A></H2>
- <B>POSTGRES95</B> is available free of charge. This manual
- describes version 1.0 of <B>POSTGRES95</B>. The authors have
- compiled and tested <B>POSTGRES95</B> on the following
- platforms:
-<p>
-<center>
-<table border=4>
- <tr>
- <th>Architecture</th>
- <th>Processor</th>
- <th>Operating System</th>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td>DECstation 3000</td>
- <td>Alpha AXP</td>
- <td>OSF/1 2.1, 3.0, 3.2</td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td>DECstation 5000</td>
- <td>MIPS</td>
- <td>ULTRIX 4.4</td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td>Sun4</td>
- <td>SPARC</td>
- <td>SunOS 4.1.3, 4.1.3_U1; Solaris 2.4</td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td>H-P 9000/700 and 800</td>
- <td>PA-RISC</td>
- <td>HP-UX 9.00, 9.01, 9.03</td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td>Intel</td>
- <td>X86</td>
- <td>Linux 1.2.8, ELF</td>
-</table>
-</center>
-<p>
-<H2><A NAME="outline-of-this-manual">1.5. Outline of This Manual</A></H2>
- From now on, We will use POSTGRES to mean <B>POSTGRES95</B>.
- The first part of this manual goes over some basic sys-
- tem concepts and procedures for starting the POSTGRES
- system. We then turn to a tutorial overview of the
- POSTGRES data model and SQL query language, introducing
- a few of its advanced features. Next, we explain the
- POSTGRES approach to extensibility and describe how
- users can extend POSTGRES by adding user-defined types,
- operators, aggregates, and both query language and pro-
- gramming language functions. After an extremely brief
- overview of the POSTGRES rule system, the manual
- concludes with a detailed appendix that discusses some of
- the more involved and operating system-specific
- procedures involved in extending the system.
-<HR>
-<B>UNIX</B> is a trademark of X/Open, Ltd. Sun4, SPARC, SunOS
-and Solaris are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. DEC,
-DECstation, Alpha AXP and ULTRIX are trademarks of Digital
-Equipment Corp. PA-RISC and HP-UX are trademarks of
-Hewlett-Packard Co. OSF/1 is a trademark of the Open
-Software Foundation.<p>
-
- We assume proficiency with UNIX and C programming.
-
-<HR>
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