The PostgreSQL language in Spanner

This page summarizes PostgreSQL language support in Spanner.

Spanner provides PostgreSQL language support by expressing Spanner database features through a subset of open source PostgreSQL language constructs, with extensions added to support Spanner features like interleaved tables and hints.

For detailed information about this support, refer to these pages:

• Lexical structure and syntax describes how to form valid PostgreSQL statements.
• Data definition (DDL) defines the syntax of DDL statements like CREATE DATABASE and CREATE TABLE.
• Data manipulation (DML) defines the syntax of DML statements like INSERT and UPDATE.
• Queries defines the syntax of the SELECT statement.
• Subqueries defines the syntax of subqueries.
• Data types describes the data types that Spanner supports.
• Functions describes the functions that Spanner supports.
• Stored procedures describes stored procedures that come with Spanner.
• Known issues in the PostgreSQL interface for Spanner describes PostgreSQL language features that don't work as expected.

Spanner doesn't support several open source PostgreSQL features, including the following:

• Triggers
• SERIAL
• Fine-grained concurrency control
• SAVEPOINT
• Transactional DDL
• Partial indexes
• Extensions
• Foreign data wrappers
• User-defined data types, functions and operators