Welcome to libpqxx, the official C++ API to the PostgreSQL database management system. There are many similar libraries for PostgreSQL and for other databases, some of them database-independent. Most of these, however, are fairly C-like in their programming style, and fail to take advantage of the full power of the C++ language as it has matured since the acceptance of the Standard in 1996. What libpqxx brings you is effective use of templates to reduce the inconvenience of dealing with type conversions; of standard C++ strings to keep you from having to worry about buffer allocation and overflow attacks; of exceptions to take the tedious and error-prone plumbing around error handling out of your hands; of constructors and destructors to bring resource management under control; and even basic object-orientation to give you some extra reliability features that would be hard to get with most other database interfaces.