Appendix L. Acronyms

October 15, 2026: PostgreSQL 19 RC 1 Released!

Documentation → PostgreSQL 18

Supported Versions: () / 17 / 16 / 15 / 14

Development Versions: 19 / devel

Unsupported versions: 13 / 12 / 11 / 10 / 9.6 / 9.5 / 9.4 / 9.3 / 9.2 / 9.1 / 9.0 / 8.4 / 8.3

Appendix L. Acronyms

This is a list of acronyms commonly used in the PostgreSQL documentation and in discussions about PostgreSQL.

AIO : Asynchronous I/O

ACL : Access Control List

AM : Access Method

ANSI : American National Standards Institute

API : Application Programming Interface

ASCII : American Standard Code for Information Interchange

BKI : Backend Interface

CA : Certificate Authority

CIDR : Classless Inter-Domain Routing

CPAN : Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

CRL : Certificate Revocation List

CSV : Comma Separated Values

CTE : Common Table Expression

CVE : Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures

DBA : Database Administrator

DBI : Database Interface (Perl)

DBMS : Database Management System

DDL : Data Definition Language, SQL commands such as CREATE TABLE, ALTER USER

DML : Data Manipulation Language, SQL commands such as INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE

DST : Daylight Saving Time

ECPG : Embedded C for PostgreSQL

ESQL : Embedded SQL

FAQ : Frequently Asked Questions

FSM : Free Space Map

GEQO : Genetic Query Optimizer

GIN : Generalized Inverted Index

GiST : Generalized Search Tree

Git : Git

GMT : Greenwich Mean Time

GSSAPI : Generic Security Services Application Programming Interface

GUC : Grand Unified Configuration, the PostgreSQL subsystem that handles server configuration

HBA : Host-Based Authentication

HOT : Heap-Only Tuples

IEC : International Electrotechnical Commission

IEEE : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

IPC : Inter-Process Communication

I/O : Input/Output

ISO : International Organization for Standardization

ISSN : International Standard Serial Number

JDBC : Java Database Connectivity

JIT : Just-in-Time compilation

JSON : JavaScript Object Notation

LDAP : Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

LSN : Log Sequence Number

MCF : Most Common Frequency, that is the frequency associated with some Most Common Value

MCV : Most Common Value, one of the values appearing most often within a particular table column

MITM : Man-in-the-middle attack

MSVC : Microsoft Visual C

MVCC : Multi-Version Concurrency Control

NLS : National Language Support

ODBC : Open Database Connectivity

OID : Object Identifier

OLAP : Online Analytical Processing

OLTP : Online Transaction Processing

ORDBMS : Object-Relational Database Management System

PAM : Pluggable Authentication Modules

PGSQL : PostgreSQL

PGXS : PostgreSQL Extension System

PID : Process Identifier

PITR : Point-In-Time Recovery (Continuous Archiving)

PL : Procedural Languages (server-side)

POSIX : Portable Operating System Interface

RDBMS : Relational Database Management System

RFC : Request For Comments

SGML : Standard Generalized Markup Language

SNI : Server Name Indication, RFC 6066

SPI : Server Programming Interface

SP-GiST : Space-Partitioned Generalized Search Tree

SQL : Structured Query Language

SRF : Set-Returning Function

SSH : Secure Shell

SSL : Secure Sockets Layer

SSPI : Security Support Provider Interface

SYSV : Unix System V

TCP/IP : Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) / Internet Protocol (IP)

TID : Tuple Identifier

TLS : Transport Layer Security

TOAST : The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique

TPC : Transaction Processing Performance Council

URL : Uniform Resource Locator

UTC : Coordinated Universal Time

UTF : Unicode Transformation Format

UTF8 : Eight-Bit Unicode Transformation Format

UUID : Universally Unique Identifier

WAL : Write-Ahead Log

XID : Transaction Identifier

XML : Extensible Markup Language

Submit correction

If you see anything in the documentation that is not correct, does not match your experience with the particular feature or requires further clarification, please use this form to report a documentation issue.