Introduction
  
   This document is the programmer's  manual  for  the  
   PostgreSQL
   database  management system, originally developed at the University
   of California at Berkeley.
   PostgreSQL  is  based  on
   
    Postgres release 4.2. 
   The Postgres project, 
   led by Professor Michael Stonebraker, has been sponsored  by  the
   Defense  Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the
   Army Research Office (ARO), the National Science  
   Foundation (NSF), and ESL, Inc.
  
  
   The first part of this manual 
   explains  the Postgres  
   approach  to  extensibility  and describe how
   users can extend Postgres 
   by adding user-defined types,
   operators, aggregates, and both query language and programming 
   language functions.
   After a discussion  of  the Postgres 
   rule system, we discuss
   the trigger and SPI interfaces.
   The manual concludes with a detailed description of 
   the programming interfaces and
   support libraries for various languages.
  
  
   We assume proficiency with Unix and C programming.
  
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