Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL

Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. The book starts with the introduction of relational databases with PostegreSQL. It then moves on to covering data definition language (DDL) with emphasis on PostgreSQL and common DDL commands supported by ANSI SQL. You will then learn the data manipulation language (DML), and advanced topics like locking and multi version concurrency control (MVCC). This will give you a very robust background to tune and troubleshoot your application. The book then covers the implementation of data models in the database such as creating tables, setting up integrity constraints, building indexes, defining views and other schema objects. Next, it will give you an overview about the NoSQL capabilities of PostgreSQL along with Hstore, XML, Json and arrays. Finally by the end of the book, you'll learn to use the JDBC driver and manipulate data objects in the Hibernate framework.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Learning PostgreSQL
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


SQL is used to interact with the database: create and maintain the data structures, put data into the database, change it, retrieve it and delete it. SQL has commands related to DDL , DML and DCL. The four SQL statements form the basis of DML: SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE. They were described in this chapter.

The SELECT statement was examined in detail to explain SQL concepts such as grouping and filtering, to show what are SQL expressions and conditions, and to explain how to use subqueries. Also, some relational algebra topics were covered in section to join tables.

In the next chapters, the more complicated topics are covered: some advanced SQL features and techniques, and the programming language PL/pgSQL, which can be used to implement functions in PostgreSQL.