PostgreSQL is a fully featured object-relational database with many enterprise features: ACID transactions, inheritance, unicode and strong support for the SQL-92 standard including subqueries, views, outer joins, foreign keys, sequences and triggers. It is also highly extensible and allows users to define internal functions in C, C++, Java, Perl, TCL, Python, Ruby, PHP and PL/PgSQL.
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.
An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data. Some general PostgreSQL limits are included in the table below.
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Maximum Database Size | Unlimited |
| Maximum Table Size | 32 TB |
| Maximum Row Size | 1.6 TB |
| Maximum Field Size | 1 GB |
| Maximum Rows per Table | Unlimited |
| Maximum Columns per Table | 250 – 1600 depending on column types |
| Maximum Indexes per Table | Unlimited |