TORONTO, Ontario (June 13, 1997) -- The PostgreSQL Development Team is pleased to announce the release of PostgreSQL version 6.1. PostgreSQL is a client/server Object-Relational DataBase Management System (ORDBMS), and is available at no charge. Originating as a research project to explore object-orientation and extensibility concepts in relational databases, the Postgres project lasted for 8 years at the University of California, Berkeley. The project was officially terminated in 1992, but in late 1995, two students at UCB, working with the last official release of Postgres, trimmed the system down and cleaned it up, releasing it as Postgres95. Renamed PostgreSQL, both to remove the date reference and to emphasize the system's support for the SQL92 standard query language, it is now being maintained by a talented team of volunteers. The result is an RDBMS that offers many of the most important features offered by major commercial systems, most of which carry multi-thousand dollar price tags. Due to its unique object-oriented features, extensibility, and source code accessibility, PostgreSQL has become quite popular in the scientific community. It has also gained fairly wide use as a database server for Web-based applications (a number of web tools now offer PostgreSQL interfaces). With the release of version 6.0, PostgreSQL offered increased reliability and better support of the ANSI/ISO SQL92 standard. Version 6.1 adds major improvements in execution speed, reliability and platform support. While PostgreSQL is not yet fully ANSI-compliant, it does support several features not found in ANSI SQL, such as inheritance. It also supports declarative queries in SQL, query optimization, concurrency control, transactions, multi-user support and a number of security features. Extensibility features include user defined operators, types, functions and access methods. Application programmer interfaces (APIs) exist for C, C++, Java, Perl4, Perl5, Python, SQL and Tcl. ODBC and JDBC drivers are available from commercial sources and free versions are under development. The system supports at least 15 different Unix platforms, including Linux, Solaris, Digital Unix, and BSD variants. The future also looks bright for PostgreSQL as it continues its transition from a research system to a commercially-viable production database system. While some of the more esoteric features that Postgres supported as a research system are being replaced with many of the same features found in modern commercial systems, PostgreSQL will continue to offer its unique, extensible, object-oriented architecture. PostgreSQL should be a serious consideration of anyone requiring a database server for their Unix system, whether for scientific data storage and analysis, administrative tasks, web-based applications, or any custom database application. A feature list, the software and additional information may be found on the world wide web at http://www.postgresql.org This is the moderated mailing list freebsd-announce. The list contains announcements of new FreeBSD capabilities, important events and project milestones. See also the FreeBSD Web pages at http://www.freebsd.org