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 car web portal database


At this stage, one can convert the logical model of the car web portal presented in Chapter 01, Relational Databases, to a physical model. To help the developer to create a table, one can follow this minimal checklist:

  • What is the primary key?
  • What is the default value for each column?
  • What is the type of each column?
  • What are the constraints on each column or set of columns?
  • Are permissions set correctly on tables, sequences, and schemas?
  • Are foreign keys specified with the proper actions?
  • What is the data life cycle?
  • What are the operations allowed on the data?

To create the car web portal schema, the formal relational model will not be applied strictly. Also, surrogate keys will be used instead of natural keys. The advantages for using surrogate keys is as follows: 

  • Natural keys can change; one can change the current email address to another one. On one hand, one could argue that, if a natural key can change, what has been identified is, in point of fact, NOT an actual...