.\" XXX standard disclaimer belongs here....
.\" $Header: /private/postgres/ref/RCS/introduction,v 1.14 1992/07/13 03:45:59 ptong Exp $
.SS INTRODUCTION 5/02/90
.XA 0 "Section 1 \*- Introduction"
.sp 2i
.ps 14
.ce
.b "SECTION 1 \*- INTRODUCTION"
.sp 3
.uh OVERVIEW
.lp
This document is the reference for the \*(PP database system
under development at the University of California, Berkeley.
It is intended to be a supplement to the \*(PP Manual, which is
included in this distribution.
The \*(PP project,
led by Professor Michael Stonebraker 
is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
.r ( \c
.A DARPA ),
the
Army Research Office (ARO), the National Science Foundation (NSF),
and
.A ESL ,
Inc.
.lp
\*(PP is distributed in source code format and is
the property of the Regents of the University of California.
However, the University will grant unlimited commercialization
rights for any derived work on the condition that it obtain an
educational license to the derived work.
For further information, consult the Berkeley Campus Software Office,
295 Evans Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
Moreover, there is no organization who can help you
with any bugs you may encounter or with any other problems.
In other words,
this is
.b unsupported
software.
.uh "\*(PP DISTRIBUTION"
.sp
This reference describes Version \*(PV of \*(PP.  The \*(PP software is
about 200,000 lines of C code, and is available for 
SUN 4 class machines, for DECstation 3100 and 5000 machines and for
the SEQUENT Symmetry machine.
Information on obtaining the source code for these computers is
available from:
.(l
Chandra Ghosh
Computer Science Division
521 Evans Hall
University of Califiornia
Berkeley, CA 94720
(510) 642-4662
.)l
.sp
Version \*(PV has been tuned modestly.  Hence on the Wisconsin benchmark,
one should expect performance about twice that of the public domain,
University of
California Version of \*(II, a relational prototype
from the late 1970s.
.sp
.uh "\*(PP DOCUMENTATION"
.lp
This
reference describes the functionality of Version \*(PV
and contains
notations where appropriate to indicate which features are not implemented in
Version \*(PV.
Application developers should note that
this reference contains only the specification for
the low-level call-oriented application program interface,
LIBPQ.
.lp
The remainder of this reference is structured as follows.
In Section 2 (UNIX),
we discuss the \*(PP capabilities that are available directly
from the operating system.
Section 3 (BUILT-INS) describes \*(PP internal data types, functions, and
operators.
Section 4 (COMMANDS) then describes \*(PQ,
the language by which a user interacts with a
\*(PP database.
Then,
Section 5 (LIBPQ) describes
a library of low level routines through which a user can
formulate \*(PQ queries from a
C program and get appropriate
return information back to his program.
Next,
Section 6 (FAST PATH) continues with a description of
a method by which applications may execute functions in \*(PP
with very high performance.
Section 7 (LARGE OBJECTS) describes the internal \*(PP interface for accessing
large objects. 
The reference concludes with Section 8 (FILES), a collection of file format
descriptions for files used by \*(PP.
.lp
.uh ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
.lp
\*(PP has been constructed by a team of undergraduate, graduate, and
staff programmers.
The contributors (in alphabetical order) consisted of
James Bell,
Jennifer Caetta,
Jolly Chen,
Ron Choi,
Jeffrey Goh,
Joey Hellerstein,
Wei Hong,
Anant Jhingran,
Greg Kemnitz,
Case Larsen
Jeff Meredith,
Michael Olson,
Lay-Peng Ong,
Spyros Potamianos,
Sunita Sarawagi,
and Cimarron Taylor.
.lp
For Version 4.0, Jeff Meredith served as chief programmer and was
responsible for
overall coordination of the project and for individually implementing the
"everything else"
portion of the system.
.lp
This reference was collectively written by
the above implementation team,
assisted by Michael Stonebraker, Chandra Ghosh and Claire Mosher.
.uh FOOTNOTES
.lp
\*(UU is a trademark of
.A AT&T .
