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PostgreSQL database service

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source, object-relational database system. 

Key features

  • Provides multi-user databases suitable for light to medium use.
  • Hosted on shared servers unless otherwise agreed due to specific additional requirements.

Access instructions

  • Contact IT Services with your suggested database name, and a short summary of its purpose. We'll then get back to you to discuss your needs. 
  • Requests for a new PostgreSQL database will take five business days to complete.

Available to staff, academic researchers and web account owners

Authorised users can use this service on devices connected to the University network or VPN.

App-based

Compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.

Funded by the University

There isn’t a cost to you for standard use.

Access instructions

  • Contact IT Services with your suggested database name, and a short summary of its purpose. We'll then get back to you to discuss your needs. 
  • Requests for a new PostgreSQL database will take five business days to complete.

Guides and help

How-to guides and set up

Contact for support

If you're experiencing technical issues and need advice, please contact IT Services.

Service commitments

We ask that you:

  • keep us informed about changes to your contact details
  • manage your use of databases allocated to you - eg, sharing and securing them appropriately
  • contact us in good time if you foresee your database's resource requirements increasing significantly
  • work with us if we identify that your database would be better placed on an alternative, larger capacity, service
  • let us know if you no longer need a database you have been allocated.

The following policies apply to all IT services provided by the University.

Availability

  • This is a live service, available 24/7.

Support

  • This service is managed by IT Services.
  • We are responsible for monitoring, identifying and fixing faults.
  • Support is available during our opening hours.

Standards

  • Our service performance and standards have been produced in consultation with our customers, and we monitor the delivery, performance and availability of facilities and services.

Resilience

This service runs on our high-availability virtual machine platform. 

In the event of a major incident, it will automatically fail over between data centres, with only a brief outage. 

Filestores are replicated between data centres and should also fail over automatically.

A backup is taken of all databases once a day for Disaster Recovery purposes, enabling them to be restored to the last nightly backup if the database were to become corrupted, or if a catastrophic event occurred to the file servers and/or data centres.

We appreciate feedback as it helps us review and continually improve our service.

Page last reviewed: 9 September 2024