PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL (often just "Postgres") is an open-source relational database management system. It supports the full SQL standard, ACID transactions, complex data types, full-text search, JSON, geospatial data via PostGIS, and pluggable storage and indexing.

Key features

• SQL standards compliance. Strong transactional guarantees and faithful SQL behaviour.
• Extensibility. Custom types, operators, and functions, plus extensions including PostGIS (geospatial), pgvector (vector search), TimescaleDB (time-series), and Citus (sharding).
• Rich data types. JSON and JSONB, arrays, ranges, UUID, network addresses, all first-class.
• MVCC. Multi-version concurrency control allows reads and writes to proceed without blocking each other.
• Managed offerings. Available on AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Amazon Aurora, Supabase, Neon, Crunchy Data, and others.

Origin

Descended from the POSTGRES project at UC Berkeley, started in 1986 by Michael Stonebraker. The SQL frontend was added in 1995, and the project was renamed PostgreSQL in 1996. The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has stewarded it since.