PostgreSQL (, POHST-gres kyoo el), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance.
PostgreSQL features transactions with atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability (ACID) properties, automatically updatable views, materialized views, triggers, foreign keys, and stored procedures.
It is supported on all major operating systems, including Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, and Windows, and handles a range of workloads from single machines to data warehouses or web services with many concurrent users.
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group focuses only on developing a database engine and closely related components.
This core is, technically, what comprises PostgreSQL itself, but there is an extensive developer community and ecosystem that provides other important feature sets that might, traditionally, be provided by a proprietary software vendor.
These include special-purpose database engine features, like those needed to support a geospatial or temporal database or features which emulate other database products.
Also available from third parties are a wide variety of user and machine interface features, such as graphical user interfaces or load balancing and high availability toolsets.
The large third-party PostgreSQL support network of people, companies, products, and projects, even though not part of The PostgreSQL Development Group, are essential to the PostgreSQL database engineās adoption and use and make up the PostgreSQL ecosystem writ large.
PostgreSQL was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the Ingres database developed at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1996, the project was renamed PostgreSQL to reflect its support for SQL. After a review in 2007, the development team decided to keep the name PostgreSQL and the alias Postgres.