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PostgreSQL Functionality

PostgreSQL systems deal with various kinds of entities:
  • users ... who can use the system, what they can do
  • groups ... groups of users, for role-based privileges
  • databases ... collections of schemas/tables/views/...
  • namespaces ... to uniquely identify objects (schema.table.attr)
  • tables ... collection of tuples (standard relational notion)
  • views ... "virtual" tables (can be made updatable)
  • functions ... operations on values from/in tables
  • triggers ... operations invoked in response to events
  • operators ... functions with infix syntax
  • aggregates ... operations over whole table columns
  • types ... user-defined data types (with own operations)
  • rules ... for query rewriting (used e.g. to implement views)
  • access methods ... efficient access to tuples in tables