EngiGuide

Whenever we talk about DBMS, the only names that come in our mind are – Oracle, MS-SQL and MySQL. Our college syllabus is still living in the era of stone age. I am pretty sure that many of you have never heard or used PostgreSQL in your college life. Yes, it is an irony that you have not used it yet. More ironical – if you are engineering student!

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL:2008 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. [Quoted at: http://www.postgresql.org/about/]

You will be amazed to know more about PostgreSQL. Postgres has won various prizes and awards from worldwide communities in past so many years. Few of them are:

• 1999 LinuxWorld Editor’s Choice Award for Best Database
• 2000 Linux Journal Editors’ Choice Awards for Best Database
• 2002 Linux New Media Editors Choice Award for Best Database
• 2003 Linux Journal Editors’ Choice Awards for Best Database
• 2004 Linux New Media Award For Best Database
• 2004 Linux Journal Editors’ Choice Awards for Best Database
• 2004 ArsTechnica Best Server Application Award
• 2005 Linux Journal Editors’ Choice Awards for Best Database
• 2006 Linux Journal Editors’ Choice Awards for Best Database
• 2008 Developer.com Product of the Year, Database Tool

You will be more surprised if you will read my post further.

Posgtres is being used by these companies as their primaryDBMS:

• Yahoo!
• MySpace
• Sony Online
• hi5.com
• reddit.com
• Skype
• International Space Station
• OpenStreetMap

Every engineering student should use PostgreSQL in any of his/her project. The query language is very similar to what you study in your academics. There is a one-click installer available for installing this on your windows box: http://www.postgresql.org/download/windows

I have 4 years of experience in working and developing enterprise level apps on PostgreSQL. Please shoot your questions, and I will be there to help.