Postgre Interview Preparation Guide

9.0, which was released September 20, 2010.

post-GRES-que-ell, per this audio file. Many people, however, just say "post-GRES".

As always, we can't be certain what will go in and what won't; the project has strict quality standards that not all patches can make before deadline. All we can tell you is what's being worked on, which includes: synchronous replication, JSON support, security labels, nearest-neighbor geographic searches, SQL/MED external data connections, column-level collations, and index-only access. By the time 9.1 is released, though, this feature list will have changed considerably.

Yes. Like other open source databases, PostgreSQL is easy to run in virtual containers and is highly portable. Several companies have support for PostgreSQL in cloud hosting environments, including Heroku, GoGrid and Joyent.

The term "NoSQL" covers such a diverse array of non-relational database implementations ... from tiny embedded databases like TokyoCabinet to massive clustered data processing platforms like Hadoop ... that it's impossible to comment on them as a general class. Non-relational databases preceded relational databases and have existed alongside them for forty years, so choosing between relational and nonrelational databases is nothing new. Users should choose the database whose features, implementation, and community support their current application needs. Further, using multiple different databases for large projects is fast becoming the norm, and PostgreSQL users are no exception.

Our feature set is generally considered to be very competitive with other leading SQL RDBMSes. Certainly there are features some of them have which we don't, and the reverse is also true. To date, only a few benchmarks have been published showing PostgreSQL to be within 10-30% of proprietary competitors. However, we have had many users migrate from other database systems – primarily Oracle and Informix – and they are completely satisfied with the performance of their PostgreSQL systems.

This is a topic that can start several hours of discussion. As a quick summary, MySQL is the "easy-to-use, web developer" database, and PostgreSQL is the "feature-rich, standards-compliant" database. PostgreSQL is liberally licensed and owned by its community; MySQL is GPL-licensed and owned by Oracle. Beyond that, each database user should make his own evaluation; open source software makes doing comparisons very easy.

None. PostgreSQL is an unincorporated association of volunteers and companies who share code under the PostgreSQL License.

wide distribution through the open source world and liberal licensing make that a difficult question to answer with any accuracy. A previous version, 8.0, had an estimated one million downloads within a seven months of release. However, most users get PostgreSQL with a Linux distribution, or with some of the many other products, OSS software, and hardware devices that include PostgreSQL.

Over 200. As with other open source projects, of course, we depend on hundreds of community members for documentation, translations, advocacy, conferences, website development, infrastructure, and peer-to-peer support.