Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 10

Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 10

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is an open source database used for handling large datasets (big data) and as a JSON document database. This book highlights the newly introduced features in PostgreSQL 10, and shows you how you can build better PostgreSQL applications, and administer your PostgreSQL database more efficiently. We begin by explaining advanced database design concepts in PostgreSQL 10, along with indexing and query optimization. You will also see how to work with event triggers and perform concurrent transactions and table partitioning, along with exploring SQL and server tuning. We will walk you through implementing advanced administrative tasks such as server maintenance and monitoring, replication, recovery, high availability, and much more. You will understand common and not-so-common troubleshooting problems and how you can overcome them. By the end of this book, you will have an expert-level command of advanced database functionalities and will be able to implement advanced administrative tasks with PostgreSQL 10.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Making use of ordered sets

Ordered sets are powerful features, but are not widely regarded as such and not widely known in the developer community. The idea is actually quite simple: data is grouped normally and then the data inside each group is ordered given a certain condition. The calculation is then performed on this sorted data.

A classic example would be the calculation of the median.

The median is the middle value. If you are, for example, earning the median income, the number of people earning less and more than you is identical. 50% of people do better and 50% of people do worse.

One way to get the median is to take sorted data and move 50% into the dataset. This is an example of what the WITHIN GROUP clause will ask PostgreSQL to do:

test=# SELECT region, 
percentile_disc(0.5) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY production)
FROM t_oil
GROUP BY 1;
region | percentile_disc...