Book Image

PostgreSQL Development Essentials

By : Baji Shaik
Book Image

PostgreSQL Development Essentials

By: Baji Shaik

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is the most advanced open source database in the world. It is easy to install, configure, and maintain by following the documentation; however, it’s difficult to develop applications using programming languages and design databases accordingly. This book is what you need to get the most out of PostgreSQL You will begin with advanced SQL topics such as views, materialized views, and cursors, and learn about performing data type conversions. You will then perform trigger operations and use trigger functions in PostgreSQL. Next we walk through data modeling, normalization concepts, and the effect of transactions and locking on the database. The next half of the book covers the types of indexes, constrains, and the concepts of table partitioning, as well as the different mechanisms and approaches available to write efficient queries or code. Later, we explore PostgreSQL Extensions and Large Object Support in PostgreSQL. Finally, you will perform database operations in PostgreSQL using PHP and Java. By the end of this book, you will have mastered all the aspects of PostgreSQL development. You will be able to build efficient enterprise-grade applications with PostgreSQL by making use of these concepts
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
PostgreSQL Development Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Summary


After reading this chapter, you will be familiar with advanced concepts of PostgreSQL. We talked about views and materialized views, which are really significant. We also talked about cursors that help run a few rows at a time rather than full query at once. This helps avoid memory overrun when results contain a large number of rows. Another usage is to return a reference to a cursor that a function has created and allow the caller to read the rows. In addition to these, we discussed the aggregation concept by using the GROUP BY clause, which is really important for calculations. Another topic that we discussed in this chapter is subquery, which is a powerful feature of PostgreSQL. However, subqueries that contain an outer reference can be very inefficient. In many instances, these queries can be rewritten to remove the outer reference, which can improve performance. Other than that, the concept we covered is join, along with self, union, and outer join; these are really helpful when we need data from multiple tables. In the next chapter, we will discuss conversion between the data types and how to deal with arrays. Also we will talk about some complex data types, such as JSON and XML.