After your database system administrator created a database for you and your user name and password in the database system, from any Sun workstation or server, you should be able to run the following command to connect to the database: psql -U username -h db.eg.bucknell.edu -d database_name Note that to be able to use this command, you need to modify your ".cshrc" file to add the the following lines. set path=($path /usr/local/postgresql/bin) setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH ${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/usr/local/postgresql/lib:. You'll need to either log out of your Sun workstation and back in or simply run the command "source .cshrc" for the command to work in your current terminal session. The website for PostgreSQL is: www.postgresql.org and documentation is at: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.2/static/index.html C and C++ programming documentation is at: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.2/static/programmer.html (see the sections called "libpq - C Library" and "libpq++ - C++ Binding Library") The C/C++ libraries you'll need will be in "/usr/local/postgresql/lib" and the headers you'll need are in "/usr/local/postgresl/include". For Java, use the "postgresql.jar" file in "/usr/local/lib". Information on PostgreSQL and JDBC is at: http://jdbc.postgresql.org