Free Database for Scholars
People who are working towards their university degree and looking for special types of sources that will help them to pad out their thesis should take a look at PostgreSQL. This is a free database where information on a wide range of topics is stored and can be accessed by users as and when they need it.
Knowledge at Your Fingertips
New features are constantly being added to PostgreSQL to help all sorts of researchers and students find the information that they need. Upgrades and add-ons are regularly released as well as a range of other types of features. As it stands many people are likely to find that the database is still lacking in terms of content and style but for the time being it can be clearly seen that a lot of effort is being made to improve things and provide researchers with everything they need and those who are willing to stick with it and be patient are likely to benefit in the end.
Get into the Studying Groove
Anyone who is serious about studying and scoring highly on their thesis or PHD is sure to find that PostgreSQL is a very useful resource. However people who are not very computer literate are likely to have trouble installing and using it at least at first while the rather stark appearance of the database may well put some people off.
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation.
An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as the 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 log for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and in is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting.
It is highly scalable both in sheer quantity of data it can manage and 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.
