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.TH "INTRODUCTION" "POSTGRES" "01/23/93"
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.XA 0 "Section 1 \(em Introduction"
.BH "SECTION 1 \(em INTRODUCTION"
.SH "OVERVIEW"
This document is the reference manual for the \*(PG database
management system under development at the University of California at
Berkeley.  The \*(PG project, led by Professor Michael Stonebraker, is
sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (\c
.SM DARPA\c
),
the Army Research Office (\c
.SM ARO\c
),
the National Science Foundation (\c
.SM NSF\c
),
and
.SM ESL\c
, Inc.
.PP
\*(PG is distributed in source code format and is the property of the
Regents of the University of California.  However, the University will
grant unlimited commercialization rights for any derived work on the
condition that it obtain an educational license to the derived work.
For further information, consult the Berkeley Campus Software Office,
295 Evans Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.  Note
that there is no organization who can help you with any bugs you may
encounter or with any other problems.  In other words, this is
.BR unsupported
software.
.SH "\*(PG DISTRIBUTION"
This reference describes Version \*(PV of \*(PG.  The \*(PG software
is about 200,000 lines of C code.  Information on obtaining the source
code is available from:
.sp
.(l
Claire Mosher
Computer Science Division
521 Evans Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
(510) 642-4662
.)l
.sp
Version \*(PV has been tuned modestly.  Hence, on the Wisconsin
benchmark, one should expect performance about twice that of the
public domain, University of California version of \*(II, a relational
prototype from the late 1970s.
.PP
As distributed, \*(PG runs on Digital Equipment Corporation computers
based on
.SM MIPS
R2000 and R3000 processors (under Ultrix 4.2 and 4.3)
and Sun Microsystems computers based on
.SM SPARC
processors (under SunOS 4.1).  Work is underway to support
Digital Equipment Corporation computers based on Alpha AXP (DECchip 21064)
processors (under OSF/1) and Hewlett-Packard computers based on PA-RISC
processors (under HP-UX).
.SH "\*(PG DOCUMENTATION"
This reference manual describes the functionality of Version \*(PV and
contains notations where appropriate to indicate which features are
not implemented in Version \*(PV.  Application developers should note
that this reference contains only the specification for the low-level
call-oriented application program interface, \*(LI.
.PP
The remainder of this reference manual is structured as follows.  In
Section 2 (UNIX), we discuss the \*(PG capabilities that are available
directly from the operating system.  Section 3 (BUILT-INS) describes
\*(PG internal data types, functions, and operators.  Section 4
(COMMANDS) then describes \*(PQ, the language by which a user
interacts with a \*(PG database.  Then, Section 5 (LIBPQ) describes a
library of low level routines through which a user can formulate \*(PQ
queries from a C program and get appropriate return information back
to his program.  Next, Section 6 (FAST PATH) continues with a
description of a method by which applications may execute functions in
\*(PG with very high performance.  Section 7 (LARGE OBJECTS) describes
the internal \*(PG interface for accessing large objects.  The
reference concludes with Section 8 (FILES), a collection of file
format descriptions for files used by \*(PG.
.SH "ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS"
\*(PG has been constructed by a team of undergraduate, graduate, and
staff programmers.  The contributors (in alphabetical order) consisted
of:
Jeff Anton,
Paul Aoki,
James Bell,
Jennifer Caetta,
Philip Chang,
Jolly Chen,
Ron Choi,
Bob Devine,
Matt Dillon,
Zelaine Fong,
Adam Glass,
Jeffrey Goh,
Steven Grady,
Serge Granik,
Marti Hearst,
Joey Hellerstein,
Michael Hirohama,
Chin-heng Hong,
Wei Hong,
Anant Jhingran,
Greg Kemnitz,
Case Larsen,
Jeff Meredith,
Michael Olson,
Nels Olson,
Lay-Peng Ong,
Carol Paxson,
Avi Pfeffer,
Spyros Potamianos,
Sunita Sarawagi,
David Muir Sharnoff,
Cimarron Taylor,
Yongdong Wang,
Kristin Wright
and
Andrew Yu.
.PP
Marc Teitelbaum served as chief programmer for Version \*(PV and was
responsible for overall coordination of the project.
.PP
This reference was collectively written by the above implementation
team, assisted by Michael Stonebraker, Chandra Ghosh and Claire Mosher.
.SH "FOOTNOTES"
\*(UU is a trademark of
.SM AT&T .
