The Conference Database
service currently uses the Postgres
extended relational database system. Postgres is in the public
domain and is available via anonymous FTP from the University
of California at Berkeley. The function called by nlrexecd
for this service is dataserve. dataserve takes
a database-system-independent client request and translates it
into the appropriate Postquel language queries which are then
executed on the Postgres database.
The conference description files are stored in the confdb library in the netlib tree. The filenames for these descriptions are the Postgres Object IDs for the corresponding entries in the Postgres database. Although the descriptions themselves are not stored in Postgres, a full-text index derived from these descriptions is stored in a Postgres relation. Postgres is used to handle searching by dates, keywords, and location. A geographical database stored in a Postgres relation handles geographical aliasing and hierarchical geographical relationships (e.g., retrieving entries for Belgium when asked for those in Europe).