<para>

<productname>&productname;</productname> is an object-relational

database management system (<acronym>ORDBMS</acronym>) basedon <ulink

database management system (<acronym>ORDBMS</acronym>), developed by Postgres Professionalonthe base of<ulink

url="http://postgresql.org"><productname>PostgreSQL</productname></ulink>, which is in turn based on

<ulink url="http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/postgres.html">

<productname>POSTGRES, Version 4.2</productname></ulink>,

</listitem>

</itemizedlist>

Also, <productname>&productname;</productname> can be extended by the

Also, <productname>&productname;</productname>, as well as <productname>PostgreSQL</productname>, can be extended by the

user in many ways, for example by adding new

<itemizedlist spacing="compact">

<para>

And because of the liberal license,

<productname>&productname;</productname> can be used, modified, and

<productname>&productname;</productname>and <productname>PostgreSQL</productname>can be used, modified, and

distributed by anyone free of charge for any purpose, be it

private, commercial, or academic.

</para>

</sect1>

<sect1 id="intro-pgpro-vs-pg">

<title> Difference between <productname>&productname;</productname> and PostgreSQL</title>

<para>

<productname>&productname;</productname> is the most actual PostgreSQL version with some additional patches applied and extensions added.

Mostly, these are patches already accepted by the PostgreSQL community and committed into PostgreSQL.

Also there some patches and extensions developed by Postgres Professional.

Users of <productname>&productname;</productname> thus have early access to some important features and fixes.

</para>

<para>Currently the difference between <productname>&productname;</productname> and PostgreSQL is the following:

<itemizedlist spacing="compact">

<listitem>

<simpara>Performance improvement on multicore systems (buffer manager and locks optimization).</simpara>

<simpara>Full text search improvements: phrase search, hunspell morphology,

some dictionaries are bundled with distribution and can be enabled by a single SQL statement,

<application>shared_ispell</application> allowing to store dictionaries in shared memory.</simpara>

<simpara>Covering indexes</simpara>

<simpara><application>libicu</application> support on all platforms, providing platform-independent sort for various locales.</simpara>

<simpara><application>pg_trgm</application> module supporting fuzzy string comparison and substring search.</simpara>

<simpara>Improved <application>pageinspect</applicaiton> module provides access to internal data storage structure.</simpara>

<simpara><application>sr_plan</applicaiton> module allows to save and restore query plans.</simpara>

<simpara><application>dump_stat</applicaiton> module allowing to save and restore database statistics when dumping/restoring the database. </simpara>

<simpara><application>jsquery</applicaiton> module provides a specific language for effective index-supported querying of JSONB data.</simpara>

</listitem>

</itemizedlist>

</para>

<para>

<productname>&productname;</productname> releases are following the PostgreSQL releases, though sometimes occur more frequently.

The <productname>&productname;</productname> versioning scheme is based on the PostgreSQL one and has an additional decimal place.

</para>

</sect1>

&history;