VMware Postgres is 100% open source software based on the PostgreSQL source code published at https://www.postgresql.org, and a collection of additional open source software to increase functionality, and flexibility. VMware Postges includes the following components:
- PostgreSQL – The core ORDBMS database engine.
- PostgreSQL ODBC Driver (psqlODBC) – Connectivity for Linux client applications.
- PostgreSQL JDBC Driver (pgjdbc) – Connectivity for Java clients.
- pgBackRest – Reliable backup and restore for PostgreSQL.
- pg_auto_failover – an extension for setting up PostgreSQL high availability with automated failover.
- Patroni – a template for setting up PostgreSQL high availability with automated failover.
VMware Postgres includes all of the contributed modules listed in Appendix F. Additional Supplied Modules in the PostgreSQL documentation. (the xml2 extension is included in VMware Postgres but is deprecated and unsupported).
All components included in the VMware Postgres software distribution are intended for Enterprise deployments, and are supported by VMware. See the Support Lifecycle Policy and the Product Support Lifecycle Matrix for details about the duration of support for VMware Postgres.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system that has more than 15 years of active development. It offers a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. PostgreSQL is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL:2008 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. PostgreSQL has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation.
Major features of PostgreSQL include:
- Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC)
- Point in time recovery
- Tablespaces
- Asynchronous replication
- Nested transactions (savepoints)
- Online/hot backups
- A sophisticated query planner/optimizer
- Write ahead logging for fault tolerance
- International character sets
- Multibyte character encodings
- Unicode
- Locale-aware support for sorting case-sensitivity, and formatting
