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The advanced features, open source code, and BSD licensing terms should have more people talking about the PostgreSQL database these days.

Like a number of rock bands, PostgreSQL reportedly has a significant following in Japan. By the project's admission though, it may rate fifth in the US in popularity among database systems as of 2004.

MySQL receives a lot of press coverage, due to its ease of use and the prominent names of firms and agencies that have implemented it for their operations. PostgreSQL offers some powerful features in its product that developers may wish to consider.

Multi-version concurrency control has been part of PostgreSQL for some time. It has native programming interfaces for a variety of languages: C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, ODBC, and Tcl.

The PostgreSQL database is open source, fully ACID compliant, includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, and can support storage of multimedia objects. With the growth of broadband adoption in the US and the world, that could be an important consideration for web application developers.

Documentation for PostgreSQL exists in online form and by PDF download in US or A4 page formats. Since the current PDF runs 12.1 MB in size, users may wish to try out the online version first.

Users coming in from other database systems can learn more about PostgreSQL within those pages. For example, the project lists advantages of working with the PL/pgSQL language:

(With SQL) every SQL statement must be executed individually by the database server.

That means that your client application must send each query to the database server, wait for it to be processed, receive the results, do some computation, then send other queries to the server. All this incurs interprocess communication and may also incur network overhead if your client is on a different machine than the database server.

With PL/pgSQL you can group a block of computation and a series of queries inside the database server, thus having the power of a procedural language and the ease of use of SQL, but saving lots of time because you don't have the whole client/server communication overhead. This can make for a considerable performance increase.
Some developers, particularly ones in a corporate environment, may favor PostgreSQL's BSD licensing over MySQL's GPL terms. (Please note that MySQL does offer commercial licenses for sale through MySQL AG). BSD licensed code can be taken and incorporated into non-open source projects, and presents a more business-friendly approach.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.