The xml2 module provides XPath querying and XSLT functionality. F.46.1. Deprecation Notice From PostgreSQL 8.3 on, there is XML-related functionality based on the SQL/XML standard in the core server. That functionality covers XML syntax checking and XPath queries, which is what this module does, and more, but the API is not at all compatible. It is planned that this module will be removed in a future version of PostgreSQL in favor of the newer standard API, so you are encouraged to try convert

PostgreSQL offers encryption at several levels, and provides flexibility in protecting data from disclosure due to database server theft, unscrupulous administrators, and insecure networks. Encryption might also be required to secure sensitive data such as medical records or financial transactions. Password Storage Encryption By default, database user passwords are stored as MD5 hashes, so the administrator cannot determine the actual password assigned to the user. If MD5 encryption is used f

Window functions provide the ability to perform calculations across sets of rows that are related to the current query row. See Section 3.5 for an introduction to this feature, and Section 4.2.8 for syntax details. The built-in window functions are listed in Table 9-56. Note that these functions must be invoked using window function syntax; that is an OVER clause is required. In addition to these functions, any built-in or user-defined normal aggregate function (but not ordered-set or hypotheti

Full Text Searching (or just text search) provides the capability to identify natural-language documents that satisfy a query, and optionally to sort them by relevance to the query. The most common type of search is to find all documents containing given query terms and return them in order of their similarity to the query. Notions of query and similarity are very flexible and depend on the specific application. The simplest search considers query as a set of words and similarity as the frequen

Traditionally, implementing a new index access method meant a lot of difficult work. It was necessary to understand the inner workings of the database, such as the lock manager and Write-Ahead Log. The GiST interface has a high level of abstraction, requiring the access method implementer only to implement the semantics of the data type being accessed. The GiST layer itself takes care of concurrency, logging and searching the tree structure. This extensibility should not be confused with the ex

There are two kinds of indexes that can be used to speed up full text searches. Note that indexes are not mandatory for full text searching, but in cases where a column is searched on a regular basis, an index is usually desirable. CREATE INDEX name ON table USING GIN (column); Creates a GIN (Generalized Inverted Index)-based index. The column must be of tsvector type. CREATE INDEX name ON table USING GIST (column); Creates a GiST (Generalized Search Tree)-based index. The column can be of

The catalog pg_type stores information about data types. Base types and enum types (scalar types) are created with CREATE TYPE, and domains with CREATE DOMAIN. A composite type is automatically created for each table in the database, to represent the row structure of the table. It is also possible to create composite types with CREATE TYPE AS. Table 50-55. pg_type Columns Name Type References Description oid oid Row identifier (hidden attribute; must be explicitly selected) typname name D

The SQL standard defines four levels of transaction isolation. The most strict is Serializable, which is defined by the standard in a paragraph which says that any concurrent execution of a set of Serializable transactions is guaranteed to produce the same effect as running them one at a time in some order. The other three levels are defined in terms of phenomena, resulting from interaction between concurrent transactions, which must not occur at each level. The standard notes that due to the d

The catalog pg_inherits records information about table inheritance hierarchies. There is one entry for each direct child table in the database. (Indirect inheritance can be determined by following chains of entries.) Table 50-27. pg_inherits Columns Name Type References Description inhrelid oid pg_class.oid The OID of the child table inhparent oid pg_class.oid The OID of the parent table inhseqno int4 If there is more than one direct parent for a child table (multiple inheritance), this nu

19.13.1. Previous PostgreSQL Versions array_nulls (boolean) This controls whether the array input parser recognizes unquoted NULL as specifying a null array element. By default, this is on, allowing array values containing null values to be entered. However, PostgreSQL versions before 8.2 did not support null values in arrays, and therefore would treat NULL as specifying a normal array element with the string value "NULL". For backward compatibility with applications that require the old be