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PG.CENTER connects PostgreSQL documentation, reference, and ecosystem knowledge. Maintained by Pigsty.

Unsupported versions: 6.4
Historical version. PostgreSQL 6.4 reached end of support in October 2003. See the current manual for supported releases.

Concepts

The fundamental notion in Postgres is that of a class, which is a named collection of object instances. Each instance has the same collection of named attributes, and each attribute is of a specific type. Furthermore, each instance has a permanent object identifier (OID) that is unique throughout the installation. Because SQL syntax refers to tables, we will use the terms table and class interchangeably. Likewise, an SQL row is an instance and SQL columns are attributes. As previously discussed, classes are grouped into databases, and a collection of databases managed by a single postmaster process constitutes an installation or site.

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Read the upstream documentation. For corrections, first check the current manual.