PostgreSQL is a complex software project, and managing it is difficult. We have found that many enhancements to PostgreSQL can be more efficiently developed independently of the main project. They can have their own developer teams, email lists, their own bug tracking, and their own release schedule. While their independence makes development easier, it makes user's jobs harder. They have to hunt around looking for database enhancements to meet their needs. This section outlines some of the more popular externally developed enhancements and guides you on how to find them. interfaces PostgreSQL includes very few interfaces with the base distribution. libpq is packaged because it is the primary C interface and many other interfaces are built on top of it. ecpg is packaged because it is tied to the server-side grammar so is very dependent on the database version. All the other interfaces are independent projects and must be installed separately. To use other interfaces, you have to do some searching. For example, GBorg at http://gborg.postgresql.org has over thirty interfaces listed in its Drivers/Interfaces section. Some of the more popular interfaces are: ODBC This is the most common interface for Windows applications. psqlODBC This is the most common interface for Windows applications. Npgsql .Net interface for more recent Windows applications. libpq++ An older C++ interface. libpqxx A newer C++ interface. pgperl A Perl interface with an API similar to libpq. DBD-Pg A Perl interface that uses the DBD-standard API. pgtcl The original version of the TCL interface. PyGreSQL A Python interface library. pgjdbc A JDBC interface. pgtclng A newer version of the TCL interface. That section also contains several server-side languages that are separate projects. pgFoundry at http://pgfoundry.org contains even more projects. Other projects are not even hosted on these servers and you will have to do an internet search to find them. extensions PostgreSQL was designed from the start to be extensible. For this reason, extensions loaded into the database can function just like features that are packaged with the database. The /contrib directory shipped with the source code contains a large number of extensions. The README file in that directory contains a summary. They include conversion tools, full-text indexing, XML tools, and additional data types and indexing methods. Other extensions are developed independently, like PostGIS. Even PostgreSQL replication solutions are developed externally. For example, Slony is a popular master/slave replication solution that is developed independently from the main projects. There are several administration tools available for PostgreSQL. The most popular is pgadmin, and there are several commercially available ones.