Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL 10 - Second Edition

Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL 10 - Second Edition

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most popular open source databases in the world, supporting the most advanced features included in SQL standards. This book will familiarize you with the latest features released in PostgreSQL 10. We’ll start with a thorough introduction to PostgreSQL and the new features introduced in PostgreSQL 10. We’ll cover the Data Definition Language (DDL) with an emphasis on PostgreSQL, and the common DDL commands supported by ANSI SQL. You’ll learn to create tables, define integrity constraints, build indexes, and set up views and other schema objects. Moving on, we’ll cover the concepts of Data Manipulation Language (DML) and PostgreSQL server-side programming capabilities using PL/pgSQL. We’ll also explore the NoSQL capabilities of PostgreSQL and connect to your PostgreSQL database to manipulate data objects. By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of the basics of PostgreSQL 10 and will have the necessary skills to build efficient database solutions.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

The problem of scalability and the CAP theorem


The requirement for a system to be scalable means that a system that supports a business now should also be able to support the same business with the same quality of service when it grows. A database can store 1 GB of data and effectively process 100 queries per second. What if the business grows 100 times? Will it be able to support 10,000 queries per second processing 100 GB of data? Maybe not now and in not the same installation. However, a scalable solution should be ready to be expanded to be able to handle the load as soon as it is needed.

Usually, scalability comes together with the distributed architecture of a system. If the database was able to utilize the power of multiple computers, then in order to scale it, one would need to add more computers to the cluster. There are solutions that do this. In fact, many NoSQL databases (even if they implement SQL) are distributed systems. One of the most spectacular examples of a scalable solution...