September 26, 2024: PostgreSQL 17 Released!
Unsupported versions: 7.3 / 7.2 / 7.1
This documentation is for an unsupported version of PostgreSQL.
You may want to view the same page for the current version, or one of the other supported versions listed above instead.

PostgreSQL 7.1.3 User's Guide

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group


Table of Contents
Preface
1. What is PostgreSQL?
2. A Short History of Postgres
2.1. The Berkeley Postgres Project
2.2. Postgres95
2.3. PostgreSQL
3. Documentation Resources
4. Terminology and Notation
5. Bug Reporting Guidelines
5.1. Identifying Bugs
5.2. What to report
5.3. Where to report bugs
6. Y2K Statement
1. SQL Syntax
1.1. Lexical Structure
1.1.1. Identifiers and Key Words
1.1.2. Constants
1.1.3. Operators
1.1.4. Special Characters
1.1.5. Comments
1.2. Columns
1.3. Value Expressions
1.3.1. Column References
1.3.2. Positional Parameters
1.3.3. Function Calls
1.3.4. Aggregate Expressions
1.4. Lexical Precedence
2. Queries
2.1. Table Expressions
2.1.1. FROM clause
2.1.2. WHERE clause
2.1.3. GROUP BY and HAVING clauses
2.2. Select Lists
2.2.1. Column Labels
2.2.2. DISTINCT
2.3. Combining Queries
2.4. Sorting Rows
2.5. LIMIT and OFFSET
3. Data Types
3.1. Numeric Types
3.1.1. The Serial Type
3.2. Monetary Type
3.3. Character Types
3.4. Date/Time Types
3.4.1. Date/Time Input
3.4.2. Date/Time Output
3.4.3. Time Zones
3.4.4. Internals
3.5. Boolean Type
3.6. Geometric Types
3.6.1. Point
3.6.2. Line Segment
3.6.3. Box
3.6.4. Path
3.6.5. Polygon
3.6.6. Circle
3.7. Network Address Data Types
3.7.1. inet
3.7.2. cidr
3.7.3. inet vs cidr
3.7.4. macaddr
3.8. Bit String Types
4. Functions and Operators
4.1. Logical Operators
4.2. Comparison Operators
4.3. Mathematical Functions and Operators
4.4. String Functions and Operators
4.5. Pattern Matching
4.5.1. Pattern Matching with LIKE
4.5.2. POSIX Regular Expressions
4.6. Formatting Functions
4.7. Date/Time Functions
4.7.1. EXTRACT, date_part
4.7.2. date_trunc
4.7.3. Current Date/Time
4.8. Geometric Functions and Operators
4.9. Network Address Type Functions
4.10. Conditional Expressions
4.11. Miscellaneous Functions
4.12. Aggregate Functions
5. Type Conversion
5.1. Overview
5.1.1. Guidelines
5.2. Operators
5.2.1. Examples
5.3. Functions
5.3.1. Examples
5.4. Query Targets
5.4.1. Examples
5.5. UNION and CASE Constructs
5.5.1. Examples
6. Arrays
7. Indices
7.1. Introduction
7.2. Index Types
7.3. Multi-Column Indices
7.4. Unique Indices
7.5. Functional Indices
7.6. Operator Classes
7.7. Keys
7.8. Partial Indices
8. Inheritance
9. Multi-Version Concurrency Control
9.1. Introduction
9.2. Transaction Isolation
9.3. Read Committed Isolation Level
9.4. Serializable Isolation Level
9.5. Data consistency checks at the application level
9.6. Locking and Tables
9.6.1. Table-level locks
9.6.2. Row-level locks
9.7. Locking and Indices
10. Managing a Database
10.1. Database Creation
10.2. Alternate Database Locations
10.3. Accessing a Database
10.4. Destroying a Database
11. Performance Tips
11.1. Using EXPLAIN
11.2. Controlling the Planner with Explicit JOINs
11.3. Populating a Database
11.3.1. Disable Auto-commit
11.3.2. Use COPY FROM
11.3.3. Remove Indices
A. Date/Time Support
A.1. Time Zones
A.1.1. Australian Time Zones
A.1.2. Date/Time Input Interpretation
A.2. History of Units
B. SQL Key Words
Bibliography
List of Examples
3-1. Using the boolean type