PostgreSQL Cloud Hosting

Quick, Simple, and Scalable PostgreSQL Cloud Hosting

What is PostgreSQL Cloud Hosting?

The PostgreSQL cloud hosting service offered by Steadfast Networks give our clients access to a powerful object-relational database system with an architecture proven over 15 years of active development. It has earned a strong reputation for data integrity, reliability, and correctness, and runs on all major operating systems.

Some of the sophisticated features that users will find on PostgreSQL include:

Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC)
GiST (Generalized Search Tree) indexing – brings together a variety of sorting and searching algorithms
point in time recovery
tablespaces
the ability to replicate asynchronously
nested transactions (savepoints)
online or hot backups
a sophisticated query planner/optimizer
write ahead logging for fault tolerance
support for international character sets, multibyte character encodings, and Unicode
locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting
LIMIT/OFFSET – allows the return of partial result sets
SQL implementation that strongly conforms to ANSI-SQL 92/99 standards
full support for subqueries (including subselects in the FROM clause)
read-committed
transaction isolation levels that are serializable
fully ACID compliant
events system – a communication system whereby clients can use the LISTEN and NOTIFY commands to transmit messages and events
support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages)
includes most SQL:2008 data types (INTEGER, BOOLEAN, NUMERIC, CHAR, DATE, VARCHAR, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP)
ability to store binary large objects such as pictures, sounds, and video
native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC
table inheritance – database designers can derive new tables from other tables, treating them like base classes; PostgreSQL supports both single and multiple inheritance in this way
highly scalable (in the quantity of data it can manage and in concurrent users)
unlimited indexes and rows per table, with 250-1600 columns depending on column type
1 GB field size
1.6 TB table size
unlimited database size
the ability to auto-increment columns through sequences
supports compound, unique, partial, and functional indexes
query rewrite system – database designers can create rules to identify specific operations for particular tables or views, then transform them into alternate operations after they’re processed
the ability to run stored procedures in more than a dozen programming languages, including Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, C/C++, and its own PL/pgSQL
flexibility from allowing triggers and stored procedures to be written in C and loaded into the database as a library
interfaces for Java (JDBC), ODBC, Perl, Python, Ruby, C, C++, PHP, Lisp, Scheme, and Qt

System Requirements for PostgreSQL Cloud Hosting

PostgreSQL users must have systems that meet several requirements before they can correctly install and use the application:

64bit CPU
64bit Operating System (runs on any number of systems, including Linux, UNIX – AIX, HP-UX, BSD, SGI IRIX, Solaris, Tru64, Mac OS X – and Windows)
2 GB of memory
Dual CPU/Core
RAID 1

Tips, Tricks, and Documentation

PostgreSQL has excellent and comprehensive documentation on their website. Numerous blogs and websites also offer a variety of tips and tricks, but users should take care as there is a lot of debate in the PostgreSQL community about misleading or outright incorrect information. A few sites that appear to be reputable are: Forever For Now
gtuhl: startup technology
Startups & stuff

PostgreSQL even has a Vimeo channel!