About the Technology

HIATLANTIS is being released in a community edition and will be available with PostgresSQL. PostgresSQL is a database tool that is available to end-users freely and is the most advanced database tool available today in open source. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation.

It is an enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data. Some general PostgreSQL limits are included in the table below.

Featureful and Standards Compliant

PostgreSQL prides itself in standards compliance. Its SQL implementation strongly conforms to the ANSI-SQL 92/99 standards. It has full support for subqueries (including subselects in the FROM clause), read-committed and serializable transaction isolation levels. And while PostgreSQL has a fully relational system catalog which itself supports multiple schemas per database, its catalog is also accessible through the Information Schema as defined in the SQL standard.

Data integrity features include (compound) primary keys, foreign keys with restricting and cascading updates/deletes, check constraints, unique constraints, and not null constraints.

It also has a host of extensions and advanced features. Among the conveniences are auto-increment columns through sequences, and LIMIT/OFFSET allowing the return of partial result sets. PostgreSQL supports compound, unique, partial, and functional indexes which can use any of its B-tree, R-tree, hash, or GiST storage methods.

Highly Customizable

PostgreSQL runs stored procedures in more than a dozen programming languages, including Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, C/C++, and its own PL/pgSQL, which is similar to Oracle's PL/SQL. Included with its standard function library are hundreds of built-in functions that range from basic math and string operations to cryptography and Oracle compatibility. Triggers and stored procedures can be written in C and loaded into the database as a library, allowing great flexibility in extending its capabilities. Similarly, PostgreSQL includes a framework that allows developers to define and create their own custom data types along with supporting functions and operators that define their behavior. As a result, a host of advanced data types have been created that range from geometric and spatial primitives to network addresses to even ISBN/ISSN (International Standard Book Number/International Standard Serial Number) data types, all of which can be optionally added to the system.

Just as there are many procedure languages supported by PostgreSQL, there are also many library interfaces as well, allowing various languages both compiled and interpreted to interface with PostgreSQL. There are interfaces for Java (JDBC), ODBC, Perl, Python, Ruby, C, C++, PHP, Lisp, Scheme, and Qt just to name a few.

Best of all, PostgreSQL's source code is available under the most liberal open source license: the BSD license. This license gives you the freedom to use, modify and distribute PostgreSQL in any form you like, open or closed source. Any modifications, enhancements, or changes you make are yours to do with as you please. As such, PostgreSQL is not only a powerful database system capable of running the enterprise, it is a development platform upon which to develop in-house, web, or commercial software products that require a capable RDBMS.