installation This describes the installation of PostgreSQL using the source code distribution. (If you are installing a pre-packaged distribution, such as an RPM or Debian package, ignore this and read the packager's instructions instead.) ./configure gmake su gmake install adduser postgres mkdir /usr/local/pgsql/data chown postgres /usr/local/pgsql/data su - postgres /usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres -D /usr/local/pgsql/data >logfile 2>&1 & /usr/local/pgsql/bin/createdb test /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql test The long version is the rest of this In general, a modern Unix-compatible platform should be able to run PostgreSQL. The platforms that had received specific testing at the time of release are listed in below. In the doc subdirectory of the distribution there are several platform-specific FAQ documents you might wish to consult if you are having trouble. The following software packages are required for building PostgreSQL: make GNU make is required; other make programs will not work. GNU make is often installed under the name gmake; this document will always refer to it by that name. (On some systems GNU make is the default tool with the name make.) To test for GNU make enter: gmake --version It is recommended to use version 3.79.1 or later. You need an ISO/ANSI C compiler (at least C89-compliant). Recent versions of GCC are recommendable, but PostgreSQL is known to build using a wide variety of compilers from different vendors. tar is required to unpack the source distribution, in addition to either gzip or bzip2. In addition, gzip is required to install the documentation. readline libedit The GNU Readline library is used by default. It allows psql (the PostgreSQL command line SQL interpreter) to remember each command you type, and allows you to use arrow keys to recall and edit previous commands. This is very helpful and is strongly recommended. If you don't want to use it then you must specify the --without-readline option to configure. As an alternative, you can often use the BSD-licensed libedit library, originally developed on NetBSD. The libedit library is GNU Readline-compatible and is used if libreadline is not found, or if --with-libedit-preferred is used as an option to configure. If you are using a package-based Linux distribution, be aware that you need both the readline and readline-devel packages, if those are separate in your distribution. zlib The zlib compression library will be used by default. If you don't want to use it then you must specify the --without-zlib option to configure. Using this option disables support for compressed archives in pg_dump and pg_restore. The following packages are optional. They are not required in the default configuration, but they are needed when certain build options are enabled, as explained below: To build the server programming language PL/Perl you need a full Perl installation, including the libperl library and the header files. Since PL/Perl will be a shared library, the libperl libperl library must be a shared library also on most platforms. This appears to be the default in recent Perl versions, but it was not in earlier versions, and in any case it is the choice of whomever installed Perl at your site. If you don't have the shared library but you need one, a message like this will appear during the PostgreSQL build to point out this fact: *** Cannot build PL/Perl because libperl is not a shared library. *** You might have to rebuild your Perl installation. Refer to *** the documentation for details. (If you don't follow the on-screen output you will merely notice that the PL/Perl library object, plperl.so or similar, will not be installed.) If you see this, you will have to rebuild and install Perl manually to be able to build PL/Perl. During the configuration process for Perl, request a shared library. To build the PL/Python server programming language, you need a Python installation with the header files and the distutils module. The minimum required version is Python 2.2. Python 3 is supported if it's version 3.1 or later; but see PL/Python documentation]]> ]]> when using Python 3. Since PL/Python will be a shared library, the libpython libpython library must be a shared library also on most platforms. This is not the case in a default Python installation. If after building and installing PostgreSQL you have a file called plpython.so (possibly a different extension), then everything went well. Otherwise you should have seen a notice like this flying by: *** Cannot build PL/Python because libpython is not a shared library. *** You might have to rebuild your Python installation. Refer to *** the documentation for details. That means you have to rebuild (part of) your Python installation to create this shared library. If you have problems, run Python 2.3 or later's configure using the --enable-shared flag. On some operating systems you don't have to build a shared library, but you will have to convince the PostgreSQL build system of this. Consult the Makefile in the src/pl/plpython directory for details. If you want to build the PL/Tcl procedural language, you of course need a Tcl installation. If you are using a pre-8.4 release of Tcl, ensure that it was built without multithreading support. To enable Native Language Support (NLS), that is, the ability to display a program's messages in a language other than English, you need an implementation of the Gettext API. Some operating systems have this built-in (e.g., Linux, NetBSD, Solaris), for other systems you can download an add-on package from . If you are using the Gettext implementation in the GNU C library then you will additionally need the GNU Gettext package for some utility programs. For any of the other implementations you will not need it. Kerberos, OpenSSL, OpenLDAP, and/or PAM, if you want to support authentication or encryption using these services. If you are building from a CVS tree instead of using a released source package, or if you want to do server development, you also need the following packages: flex lex bison yacc GNU Flex and Bison are needed to build from a CVS checkout, or if you changed the actual scanner and parser definition files. If you need them, be sure to get Flex 2.5.31 or later and Bison 1.875 or later. Other lex and yacc programs cannot be used. perl Perl 5.8 or later is needed to build from a CVS checkout, or if you changed the input files for any of the build steps that use Perl scripts. If building on Windows you will need Perl in any case. If you need to get a GNU package, you can find it at your local GNU mirror site (see for a list) or at . Also check that you have sufficient disk space. You will need about 100 MB for the source tree during compilation and about 20 MB for the installation directory. An empty database cluster takes about 35 MB; databases take about five times the amount of space that a flat text file with the same data would take. If you are going to run the regression tests you will temporarily need up to an extra 150 MB. Use the df command to check free disk space. The PostgreSQL &version; sources can be obtained by anonymous FTP from . Other download options can be found on our website: . After you have obtained the file, unpack it: gunzip postgresql-&version;.tar.gz tar xf postgresql-&version;.tar This will create a directory postgresql-&version; under the current directory with the PostgreSQL sources. Change into that directory for the rest of the installation procedure. You can also get the source directly from the version control repository, see . ]]> upgrading These instructions assume that your existing installation is under the /usr/local/pgsql directory, and that the data area is in /usr/local/pgsql/data. Substitute your paths appropriately. The internal data storage format typically changes in every major release of PostgreSQL. Therefore, if you are upgrading an existing installation that does not have a version number of &majorversion;.x, you must back up and restore your data. If you are upgrading from PostgreSQL &majorversion;.x, the new version can use your current data files so you should skip the backup and restore steps below because they are unnecessary. If making a backup, make sure that your database is not being updated. This does not affect the integrity of the backup, but the changed data would of course not be included. If necessary, edit the permissions in the file /usr/local/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf (or equivalent) to disallow access from everyone except you. pg_dumpall use during upgrade To back up your database installation, type: pg_dumpall > outputfile If you need to preserve OIDs (such as when using them as foreign keys), then use the -o option when running pg_dumpall. To make the backup, you can use the pg_dumpall command from the version you are currently running. For best results, however, try to use the pg_dumpall command from PostgreSQL &version;, since this version contains bug fixes and improvements over older versions. While this advice might seem idiosyncratic since you haven't installed the new version yet, it is advisable to follow it if you plan to install the new version in parallel with the old version. In that case you can complete the installation normally and transfer the data later. This will also decrease the downtime. Shut down the old server: pg_ctl stop On systems that have PostgreSQL started at boot time, there is probably a start-up file that will accomplish the same thing. For example, on a Red Hat Linux system one might find that this works: /etc/rc.d/init.d/postgresql stop If restoring from backup, rename or delete the old installation directory. It is a good idea to rename the directory, rather than delete it, in case you have trouble and need to revert to it. Keep in mind the directory might consume significant disk space. To rename the directory, use a command like this: mv /usr/local/pgsql /usr/local/pgsql.old Install the new version of PostgreSQL as outlined in .]]> Create a new database cluster if needed. Remember that you must execute these commands while logged in to the special database user account (which you already have if you are upgrading). /usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data Restore your previous pg_hba.conf and any postgresql.conf modifications. Start the database server, again using the special database user account: /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres -D /usr/local/pgsql/data Finally, restore your data from backup with: /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql -d postgres -f outputfile using the new psql. Further discussion appears in ,]]> including instructions on how the previous installation can continue running while the new installation is installed. To start the build, type: gmake (Remember to use GNU make.) The build will take a few minutes depending on your hardware. The last line displayed should be: All of PostgreSQL is successfully made. Ready to install. If you want to build everything that can be built, including the HTML documentation and the Additional Modules, type instead: gmake world The last line displayed should be: PostgreSQL, contrib and HTML documentation successfully made. Ready to install. regression test If you want to test the newly built server before you install it, you can run the regression tests at this point. The regression tests are a test suite to verify that PostgreSQL runs on your machine in the way the developers expected it to. Type: gmake check (This won't work as root; do it as an unprivileged user.) src/test/regress/README and the documentation contain]]> contains]]> detailed information about interpreting the test results. You can repeat this test at any later time by issuing the same command. If you are upgrading an existing system and are going to install the new files over the old ones, be sure to back up your data and shut down the old server before proceeding, as explained in above. To install PostgreSQL enter: gmake install This will install files into the directories that were specified in . Make sure that you have appropriate permissions to write into that area. Normally you need to do this step as root. Alternatively, you can create the target directories in advance and arrange for appropriate permissions to be granted. If you built the world above, type instead: gmake install-world You can use gmake install-strip instead of gmake install to strip the executable files and libraries as they are installed. This will save some space. If you built with debugging support, stripping will effectively remove the debugging support, so it should only be done if debugging is no longer needed. install-strip tries to do a reasonable job saving space, but it does not have perfect knowledge of how to strip every unneeded byte from an executable file, so if you want to save all the disk space you possibly can, you will have to do manual work. The standard installation provides all the header files needed for client application development as well as for server-side program development, such as custom functions or data types written in C. (Prior to PostgreSQL 8.0, a separate gmake install-all-headers command was needed for the latter, but this step has been folded into the standard install.) If you want to install only the client applications and interface libraries, then you can use these commands: gmake -C src/bin install gmake -C src/include install gmake -C src/interfaces install gmake -C doc install src/bin has a few binaries for server-only use, but they are small. To register a Windows eventlog library with the operating system, issue this command after installation: regsvr32 pgsql_library_directory/pgevent.dll This creates registry entries used by the event viewer. To undo the installation use the command gmake uninstall. However, this will not remove any created directories. After the installation you can free disk space by removing the built files from the source tree with the command gmake clean. This will preserve the files made by the configure program, so that you can rebuild everything with gmake later on. To reset the source tree to the state in which it was distributed, use gmake distclean. If you are going to build for several platforms within the same source tree you must do this and re-configure for each platform. (Alternatively, use a separate build tree for each platform, so that the source tree remains unmodified.) If you perform a build and then discover that your configure options were wrong, or if you change anything that configure investigates (for example, software upgrades), then it's a good idea to do gmake distclean before reconfiguring and rebuilding. Without this, your changes in configuration choices might not propagate everywhere they need to. shared library On some systems with shared libraries you need to tell the system how to find the newly installed shared libraries. The systems on which this is not necessary include BSD/OS, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Tru64 UNIX (formerly Digital UNIX), and Solaris. The method to set the shared library search path varies between platforms, but the most widely-used method is to set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH like so: In Bourne shells (sh, ksh, bash, zsh): LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/lib export LD_LIBRARY_PATH or in csh or tcsh: setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/local/pgsql/lib Replace /usr/local/pgsql/lib with whatever you set --libdir to in . You should put these commands into a shell start-up file such as /etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile. Some good information about the caveats associated with this method can be found at . On some systems it might be preferable to set the environment variable LD_RUN_PATH before building. On Cygwin, put the library directory in the PATH or move the .dll files into the bin directory. If in doubt, refer to the manual pages of your system (perhaps ld.so or rld). If you later get a message like: psql: error in loading shared libraries libpq.so.2.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory then this step was necessary. Simply take care of it then. ldconfig If you are on BSD/OS, Linux, or SunOS 4 and you have root access you can run: /sbin/ldconfig /usr/local/pgsql/lib (or equivalent directory) after installation to enable the run-time linker to find the shared libraries faster. Refer to the manual page of ldconfig for more information. On FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD the command is: /sbin/ldconfig -m /usr/local/pgsql/lib instead. Other systems are not known to have an equivalent command. PATH If you installed into /usr/local/pgsql or some other location that is not searched for programs by default, you should add /usr/local/pgsql/bin (or whatever you set --bindir to in ) into your PATH. Strictly speaking, this is not necessary, but it will make the use of PostgreSQL much more convenient. To do this, add the following to your shell start-up file, such as ~/.bash_profile (or /etc/profile, if you want it to affect all users): PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/bin:$PATH export PATH If you are using csh or tcsh, then use this command: set path = ( /usr/local/pgsql/bin $path ) MANPATH To enable your system to find the man documentation, you need to add lines like the following to a shell start-up file unless you installed into a location that is searched by default: MANPATH=/usr/local/pgsql/man:$MANPATH export MANPATH The environment variables PGHOST and PGPORT specify to client applications the host and port of the database server, overriding the compiled-in defaults. If you are going to run client applications remotely then it is convenient if every user that plans to use the database sets PGHOST. This is not required, however; the settings can be communicated via command line options to most client programs. The following is a quick summary of how to get PostgreSQL up and running once installed. The main documentation contains more information. Create a user account for the PostgreSQL server. This is the user the server will run as. For production use you should create a separate, unprivileged account (postgres is commonly used). If you do not have root access or just want to play around, your own user account is enough, but running the server as root is a security risk and will not work. adduser postgres Create a database installation with the initdb command. To run initdb you must be logged in to your PostgreSQL server account. It will not work as root. root# mkdir /usr/local/pgsql/data root# chown postgres /usr/local/pgsql/data root# su - postgres postgres$ /usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data The -D option specifies the location where the data will be stored. You can use any path you want, it does not have to be under the installation directory. Just make sure that the server account can write to the directory (or create it, if it doesn't already exist) before starting initdb, as illustrated here. At this point, if you did not use the initdb -A option, you might want to modify pg_hba.conf to control local access to the server before you start it. The default is to trust all local users. The previous initdb step should have told you how to start up the database server. Do so now. The command should look something like: /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres -D /usr/local/pgsql/data This will start the server in the foreground. To put the server in the background use something like: nohup /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postgres -D /usr/local/pgsql/data \ </dev/null >>server.log 2>&1 </dev/null & To stop a server running in the background you can type: kill `cat /usr/local/pgsql/data/postmaster.pid` Create a database: createdb testdb Then enter: psql testdb to connect to that database. At the prompt you can enter SQL commands and start experimenting. The PostgreSQL distribution contains a comprehensive documentation set, which you should read sometime. After installation, the documentation can be accessed by pointing your browser to /usr/local/pgsql/doc/html/index.html, unless you changed the installation directories. The first few chapters of the main documentation are the Tutorial, which should be your first reading if you are completely new to SQL databases. If you are familiar with database concepts then you want to proceed with part on server administration, which contains information about how to set up the database server, database users, and authentication. Usually, you will want to modify your computer so that it will automatically start the database server whenever it boots. Some suggestions for this are in the documentation. Run the regression tests against the installed server (using gmake installcheck). If you didn't run the tests before installation, you should definitely do it now. This is also explained in the documentation. By default, PostgreSQL is configured to run on minimal hardware. This allows it to start up with almost any hardware configuration. The default configuration is, however, not designed for optimum performance. To achieve optimum performance, several server parameters must be adjusted, the two most common being shared_buffers and work_mem. Other parameters mentioned in the documentation also affect performance. ]]> A platform (that is, a CPU architecture and operating system combination) is considered supported by the PostgreSQL development community if the code contains provisions to work on that platform and it has recently been verified to build and pass its regression tests on that platform. Currently, most testing of platform compatibility is done automatically by test machines in the PostgreSQL Build Farm. If you are interested in using PostgreSQL on a platform that is not represented in the build farm, but on which the code works or can be made to work, you are strongly encouraged to set up a build farm member machine so that continued compatibility can be assured. In general, PostgreSQL can be expected to work on these CPU architectures: x86, x86_64, IA64, PowerPC, PowerPC 64, S/390, S/390x, Sparc, Sparc 64, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, MIPSEL, M68K, and PA-RISC. Code support exists for M32R, NS32K, and VAX, but these architectures are not known to have been tested recently. It is often possible to build on an unsupported CPU type by configuring with --disable-spinlocks, but performance will be poor. PostgreSQL can be expected to work on these operating systems: Linux (all recent distributions), Windows (Win2000 SP4 and later), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, AIX, HP/UX, IRIX, Solaris, Tru64 Unix, and UnixWare. Other Unix-like systems may also work but are not currently being tested. In most cases, all CPU architectures supported by a given operating system will work. Look in the below to see if there is information specific to your operating system, particularly if using an older system. If you have installation problems on a platform that is known to be supported according to recent build farm results, please report it to pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org. If you are interested in porting PostgreSQL to a new platform, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org is the appropriate place to discuss that. This section documents additional platform-specific issues regarding the installation and setup of PostgreSQL. Be sure to read the installation instructions, and in particular as well. Also, check src/test/regress/README and the documentation]]> ]]> regarding the interpretation of regression test results. Platforms that are not covered here have no known platform-specific installation issues. AIX installation on PostgreSQL works on AIX, but getting it installed properly can be challenging. AIX versions from 4.3.3 to 6.1 are considered supported. You can use GCC or the native IBM compiler xlc. In general, using recent versions of AIX and PostgreSQL helps. Check the build farm for up to date information about which versions of AIX are known to work. Use the following configure flags in addition to your own if you have installed Readline or libz there: --with-includes=/usr/local/include --with-libraries=/usr/local/lib. If you don't have a PowerPC or use GCC you might see rounding differences in the geometry regression test. There will probably be warnings about 0.0/0.0 division and duplicate symbols which you can safely ignore. Some of the AIX tools may be a little different from what you may be accustomed to on other platforms. If you are looking for a version of ldd, useful for determining what object code depends on what libraries, the following URLs may help you: , . shows the minimum recommended fix levels for various AIX versions. To check your current fix level, use oslevel -r in AIX 4.3.3 to AIX 5.2 ML 7, or oslevel -s in later versions. AIX version fix level AIX 4.3.3 Maintenance Level 11 + post ML11 bundle AIX 5.1 Maintenance Level 9 + post ML9 bundle AIX 5.2 Technology Level 10 Service Pack 3 AIX 5.3 Technology Level 7 AIX 6.1 Base Level On AIX 5.3, there have been some problems getting PostgreSQL to compile and run using GCC. You will want to use a version of GCC subsequent to 3.3.2, particularly if you use a prepackaged version. We had good success with 4.0.1. Problems with earlier versions seem to have more to do with the way IBM packaged GCC than with actual issues with GCC, so that if you compile GCC yourself, you might well have success with an earlier version of GCC. AIX 5.3 has a problem where sockaddr_storage is not defined to be large enough. In version 5.3, IBM increased the size of sockaddr_un, the address structure for Unix-domain sockets, but did not correspondingly increase the size of sockaddr_storage. The result of this is that attempts to use Unix-domain sockets with PostgreSQL lead to libpq overflowing the data structure. TCP/IP connections work OK, but not Unix-domain sockets, which prevents the regression tests from working. The problem was reported to IBM, and is recorded as bug report PMR29657. If you upgrade to maintenance level 5300-03 or later, that will include this fix. A quick workaround is to alter _SS_MAXSIZE to 1025 in /usr/include/sys/socket.h. In either case, recompile PostgreSQL once you have the corrected header file. PostgreSQL relies on the system's getaddrinfo function to parse IP addresses in listen_addresses, pg_hba.conf, etc. Older versions of AIX have assorted bugs in this function. If you have problems related to these settings, updating to the appropriate fix level shown in should take care of it. One user reports: When implementing PostgreSQL version 8.1 on AIX 5.3, we periodically ran into problems where the statistics collector would mysteriously not come up successfully. This appears to be the result of unexpected behaviour in the IPv6 implementation. It looks like PostgreSQL and IPv6 do not play very well together at this time on AIX. Any of the following actions fix the problem. Delete the IPv6 address for localhost: (as root) # ifconfig lo0 inet6 ::1/0 delete Remove IPv6 from net services. The file /etc/netsvc.conf on AIX is roughly equivalent to /etc/nsswitch.conf on Solaris/Linux. The default, on AIX, is thus: hosts=local,bind Replace this with: hosts=local4,bind4 to deactivate searching for IPv6 addresses. AIX can be somewhat peculiar with regards to the way it does memory management. You can have a server with many multiples of gigabytes of RAM free, but still get out of memory or address space errors when running applications. One example is createlang failing with unusual errors. For example, running as the owner of the PostgreSQL installation: -bash-3.00$ createlang plperl template1 createlang: language installation failed: ERROR: could not load library "/opt/dbs/pgsql748/lib/plperl.so": A memory address is not in the address space for the process. Running as a non-owner in the group posessing the PostgreSQL installation: -bash-3.00$ createlang plperl template1 createlang: language installation failed: ERROR: could not load library "/opt/dbs/pgsql748/lib/plperl.so": Bad address Another example is out of memory errors in the PostgreSQL server logs, with every memory allocation near or greater than 256 MB failing. The overall cause of all these problems is the default bittedness and memory model used by the server process. By default, all binaries built on AIX are 32-bit. This does not depend upon hardware type or kernel in use. These 32-bit processes are limited to 4 GB of memory laid out in 256 MB segments using one of a few models. The default allows for less than 256 MB in the heap as it shares a single segment with the stack. In the case of the createlang example, above, check your umask and the permissions of the binaries in your PostgreSQL installation. The binaries involved in that example were 32-bit and installed as mode 750 instead of 755. Due to the permissions being set in this fashion, only the owner or a member of the possessing group can load the library. Since it isn't world-readable, the loader places the object into the process' heap instead of the shared library segments where it would otherwise be placed. The ideal solution for this is to use a 64-bit build of PostgreSQL, but that is not always practical, because systems with 32-bit processors can build, but not run, 64-bit binaries. If a 32-bit binary is desired, set LDR_CNTRL to MAXDATA=0xn0000000, where 1 <= n <= 8, before starting the PostgreSQL server, and try different values and postgresql.conf settings to find a configuration that works satisfactorily. This use of LDR_CNTRL tells AIX that you want the server to have MAXDATA bytes set aside for the heap, allocated in 256 MB segments. When you find a workable configuration, ldedit can be used to modify the binaries so that they default to using the desired heap size. PostgreSQL can also be rebuilt, passing configure LDFLAGS="-Wl,-bmaxdata:0xn0000000" to achieve the same effect. For a 64-bit build, set OBJECT_MODE to 64 and pass CC="gcc -maix64" and LDFLAGS="-Wl,-bbigtoc" to configure. (Options for xlc might differ.) If you omit the export of OBJECT_MODE, your build may fail with linker errors. When OBJECT_MODE is set, it tells AIX's build utilities such as ar, as, and ld what type of objects to default to handling. By default, overcommit of paging space can happen. While we have not seen this occur, AIX will kill processes when it runs out of memory and the overcommit is accessed. The closest to this that we have seen is fork failing because the system decided that there was not enough memory for another process. Like many other parts of AIX, the paging space allocation method and out-of-memory kill is configurable on a system- or process-wide basis if this becomes a problem. IBM Redbook Cygwin installation on PostgreSQL can be built using Cygwin, a Linux-like environment for Windows, but that method is inferior to the native Windows build )]]> and is no longer recommended. When building from source, proceed according to the normal installation procedure (i.e., ./configure; make; etc.), noting the following-Cygwin specific differences: Set your path to use the Cygwin bin directory before the Windows utilities. This will help prevent problems with compilation. The GNU make command is called "make" not "gmake". The adduser command is not supported; use the appropriate user management application on Windows NT, 2000, or XP. Otherwise, skip this step. The su command is not supported; use ssh to simulate su on Windows NT, 2000, or XP. Otherwise, skip this step. OpenSSL is not supported. Start cygserver for shared memory support. To do this, enter the command /usr/sbin/cygserver &. This program needs to be running anytime you start the PostgreSQL server or initialize a database cluster (initdb). The default cygserver configuration may need to be changed (e.g., increase SEMMNS) to prevent PostgreSQL from failing due to a lack of system resources. The parallel regression tests (make check) can generate spurious regression test failures due to overflowing the listen() backlog queue which causes connection refused errors or hangs. You can limit the number of connections using the make variable MAX_CONNECTIONS thus: make MAX_CONNECTIONS=5 check (On some systems you can have up to about 10 simultaneous connections). It is possible to install cygserver and the PostgreSQL server as Windows NT services. For information on how to do this, please refer to the README document included with the PostgreSQL binary package on Cygwin. It is installed in the directory /usr/share/doc/Cygwin. HP-UX installation on PostgreSQL 7.3+ should work on Series 700/800 PA-RISC machines running HP-UX 10.X or 11.X, given appropriate system patch levels and build tools. At least one developer routinely tests on HP-UX 10.20, and we have reports of successful installations on HP-UX 11.00 and 11.11. Aside from the PostgreSQL source distribution, you will need GNU make (HP's make will not do), and either GCC or HP's full ANSI C compiler. If you intend to build from CVS sources rather than a distribution tarball, you will also need Flex (GNU lex) and Bison (GNU yacc). We also recommend making sure you are fairly up-to-date on HP patches. At a minimum, if you are building 64 bit binaries on on HP-UX 11.11 you may need PHSS_30966 (11.11) or a successor patch otherwise initdb may hang: PHSS_30966 s700_800 ld(1) and linker tools cumulative patch On general principles you should be current on libc and ld/dld patches, as well as compiler patches if you are using HP's C compiler. See HP's support sites such as and for free copies of their latest patches. If you are building on a PA-RISC 2.0 machine and want to have 64-bit binaries using GCC, you must use GCC 64-bit version. GCC binaries for HP-UX PA-RISC and Itanium are available from . Don't forget to get and install binutils at the same time. If you are building on a PA-RISC 2.0 machine and want the compiled binaries to run on PA-RISC 1.1 machines you will need to specify +DAportable in CFLAGS. If you are building on a HP-UX Itanium machine, you will need the latest HP ANSI C compiler with its dependent patch or successor patches: PHSS_30848 s700_800 HP C Compiler (A.05.57) PHSS_30849 s700_800 u2comp/be/plugin library Patch If you have both HP's C compiler and GCC's, then you might want to explicitly select the compiler to use when you run configure: ./configure CC=cc for HP's C compiler, or ./configure CC=gcc for GCC. If you omit this setting, then configure will pick gcc if it has a choice. The default install target location is /usr/local/pgsql, which you might want to change to something under /opt. If so, use the --prefix switch to configure. In the regression tests, there might be some low-order-digit differences in the geometry tests, which vary depending on which compiler and math library versions you use. Any other error is cause for suspicion. IRIX installation on PostgreSQL has been reported to run successfully on MIPS r8000, r10000 (both ip25 and ip27) and r12000(ip35) processors, running IRIX 6.5.5m, 6.5.12, 6.5.13, and 6.5.26 with MIPSPro compilers version 7.30, 7.3.1.2m, 7.3, and 7.4.4m. You will need the MIPSPro full ANSI C compiler. There are problems trying to build with GCC. It is a known GCC bug (not fixed as of version 3.0) related to using functions that return certain kinds of structures. This bug affects functions like inet_ntoa, inet_lnaof, inet_netof, inet_makeaddr, and semctl. It is supposed to be fixed by forcing code to link those functions with libgcc, but this has not been tested yet. It is known that version 7.4.1m of the MIPSPro compiler generates incorrect code. The symptom is invalid primary checkpoint record when trying to start the database.) Version 7.4.4m is OK; the status of intermediate versions is uncertain. There may be a compilation problem like the following: cc-1020 cc: ERROR File = pqcomm.c, Line = 427 The identifier "TCP_NODELAY" is undefined. if (setsockopt(port->sock, IPPROTO_TCP, TCP_NODELAY, Some versions include TCP definitions in sys/xti.h, so it is necessary to add #include <sys/xti.h> in src/backend/libpq/pqcomm.c and in src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c. If you encounter this, please let us know so we can develop a proper fix. In the regression tests, there might be some low-order-digit differences in the geometry tests, depending on which FPU are you using. Any other error is cause for suspicion. MinGW installation on PostgreSQL for Windows can be built using MinGW, a Unix-like build environment for Microsoft operating systems, or using Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler suite. The MinGW build variant uses the normal build system described in this chapter; the Visual C++ build works completely differently and is described in ]]>. It is a fully native build and uses no additional software like MinGW. A ready-made installer is available on the main PostgreSQL web site. The native Windows port requires a 32 or 64-bit version of Windows 2000 or later. Earlier operating systems do not have sufficient infrastructure (but Cygwin may be used on those). MinGW, the Unix-like build tools, and MSYS, a collection of Unix tools required to run shell scripts like configure, can be downloaded from . Neither is required to run the resulting binaries; they are needed only for creating the binaries. After you have everything installed, it is suggested that you run psql under CMD.EXE, as the MSYS console has buffering issues. SCO installation on UnixWare installation on PostgreSQL can be built on SCO UnixWare 7 and SCO OpenServer 5. On OpenServer, you can use either the OpenServer Development Kit or the Universal Development Kit. However, some tweaking may be needed, as described below. You should locate your copy of the SCO Skunkware CD. The Skunkware CD is included with UnixWare 7 and current versions of OpenServer 5. Skunkware includes ready-to-install versions of many popular programs that are available on the Internet. For example, gzip, gunzip, GNU Make, Flex, and Bison are all included. For UnixWare 7.1, this CD is now labeled "Open License Software Supplement". If you do not have this CD, the software on it is available from . Skunkware has different versions for UnixWare and OpenServer. Make sure you install the correct version for your operating system, except as noted below. On UnixWare 7.1.3 and beyond, the GCC compiler is included on the UDK CD as is GNU Make. You need to use the GNU Make program, which is on the Skunkware CD. By default, it installs as /usr/local/bin/make. To avoid confusion with the SCO make program, you may want to rename GNU make to gmake. As of UnixWare 7.1.3 and above, the GNU Make program is is the OSTK portion of the UDK CD, and is in /usr/gnu/bin/gmake. The Readline library is on the Skunkware CD. But it is not included on the UnixWare 7.1 Skunkware CD. If you have the UnixWare 7.0.0 or 7.0.1 Skunkware CDs, you can install it from there. Otherwise, try . By default, Readline installs into /usr/local/lib and /usr/local/include. However, the PostgreSQL configure program will not find it there without help. If you installed Readline, then use the following options to configure: ./configure --with-libraries=/usr/local/lib --with-includes=/usr/local/include If you are using the new Universal Development Kit (UDK) compiler on OpenServer, you need to specify the locations of the UDK libraries: ./configure --with-libraries=/udk/usr/lib --with-includes=/udk/usr/include Putting these together with the Readline options from above: ./configure --with-libraries="/udk/usr/lib /usr/local/lib" --with-includes="/udk/usr/include /usr/local/include" By default, the PostgreSQL man pages are installed into /usr/local/pgsql/man. By default, UnixWare does not look there for man pages. To be able to read them you need to modify the MANPATH variable in /etc/default/man, for example: MANPATH=/usr/lib/scohelp/%L/man:/usr/dt/man:/usr/man:/usr/share/man:scohelp:/usr/local/man:/usr/local/pgsql/man On OpenServer, some extra research needs to be invested to make the man pages usable, because the man system is a bit different from other platforms. Currently, PostgreSQL will not install them at all. For compilers earlier than the one released with OpenUNIX 8.0.0 (UnixWare 7.1.2), including the 7.1.1b Feature Supplement, you may need to specify -Xb in CFLAGS or the CC environment variable. The indication of this is an error in compiling tuplesort.c referencing inline functions. Apparently there was a change in the 7.1.2(8.0.0) compiler and beyond. For threading, youmust use -Kpthread on all libpq-using programs. libpq uses pthread_* calls, which are only available with the -Kpthread/-Kthread flag. Solaris installation on PostgreSQL is well-supported on Solaris. The more up to date your operating system, the fewer issues you will experience; details below. Note that PostgreSQL is bundled with Solaris 10 (from update 2). Official packages are also available on . Packages for older Solaris versions (8, 9) you can be obtained from or . You can build with either GCC or Sun's compiler suite. For better code optimization, Sun's compiler is strongly recommended on the SPARC architecture. We have heard reports of problems when using GCC 2.95.1; gcc 2.95.3 or later is recommended. If you are using Sun's compiler, be careful not to select /usr/ucb/cc; use /opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc. You can download Sun Studio from . Many of GNU tools are integrated into Solaris 10, or they are present on the Solaris companion CD. If you like packages for older version of Solaris, you can find these tools at or . If you prefer sources, look at . When you build PostgreSQL with OpenSSL support you might get compilation errors in the following files: src/backend/libpq/crypt.c src/backend/libpq/password.c src/interfaces/libpq/fe-auth.c src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c This is because of a namespace conflict between the standard /usr/include/crypt.h header and the header files provided by OpenSSL. Upgrading your OpenSSL installation to version 0.9.6a fixes this problem. Solaris 9 and above has a newer version of OpenSSL. If configure complains about a failed test program, this is probably a case of the run-time linker being unable to find some library, probably libz, libreadline or some other non-standard library such as libssl. To point it to the right location, set the LDFLAGS environment variable on the configure command line, e.g., configure ... LDFLAGS="-R /usr/sfw/lib:/opt/sfw/lib:/usr/local/lib" See the ld1 man page for more information. On Solaris 7 and older, the 64-bit version of libc has a buggy vsnprintf routine, which leads to erratic core dumps in PostgreSQL. The simplest known workaround is to force PostgreSQL to use its own version of vsnprintf rather than the library copy. To do this, after you run configure edit a file produced by configure: In src/Makefile.global, change the line LIBOBJS = to read LIBOBJS = snprintf.o (There might be other files already listed in this variable. Order does not matter.) Then build as usual. On the SPARC architecture, Sun Studio is strongly recommended for compilation. Try using the -xO5 optimization flag to generate significantly faster binaries. Do not use any flags that modify behavior of floating-point operations and errno processing (e.g., -fast). These flags could raise some nonstandard PostgreSQL behavior for example in the date/time computing. If you do not have a reason to use 64-bit binaries on SPARC, prefer the 32-bit version. The 64-bit operations are slower and 64-bit binaries are slower than the 32-bit variants. And on other hand, 32-bit code on the AMD64 CPU family is not native, and that is why 32-bit code is significant slower on this CPU family. Some tricks for tuning PostgreSQL and Solaris for performance can be found at . This article is primary focused on T2000 platform, but many of the recommendations are also useful on other hardware with Solaris. Yes, using DTrace is possible. See ]]> for further information. You can also find more information in this article: . If you see the linking of the postgres executable abort with an error message like: Undefined first referenced symbol in file AbortTransaction utils/probes.o CommitTransaction utils/probes.o ld: fatal: Symbol referencing errors. No output written to postgres collect2: ld returned 1 exit status gmake: *** [postgres] Error 1 your DTrace installation is too old to handle probes in static functions. You need Solaris 10u4 or newer.