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

Using the Self join

The tables we are joining don't have to be different ones. We can join a table with itself. This is called a self join. In this case, we will use aliases for the table; otherwise, PostgreSQL will not know which column of which table instance we mean. To join a table with itself means that each row of the table is combined with itself, and with every other row of the table. The self join can be viewed as a joining of two copies of the same table. The table is not actually copied but SQL carries out the command as though it were.

The syntax of the command to join a table with itself is almost the same as that of joining two different tables:

SELECT a.column_name, b.column_name...
FROM table1 a, table1 b 
WHERE condition1 and/or condition2

To distinguish the column names from one another, aliases for the actual table names are used as both the tables have the same name. Table name aliases are defined in the FROM clause of the SELECT statement.

Let's consider an example where you want to find a list of employees and their supervisor. For this example, we will consider the Employee table that has the columns Employee_id, Employee_name, and Supervisor_id. The Supervisor_id contains nothing but the Employee_id of the person who the employee reports to.

Using the Self join

In the following example, we will use the table Employee twice; and in order to do this, we will use the alias of the table:

SELECT a.emp_id AS "Emp_ID", a.emp_name AS "Employee Name",
b.emp_id AS "Supervisor ID",b.emp_name AS "Supervisor Name"
FROM employee a, employee b
WHERE a.supervisor_id = b.emp_id;

For every record, it will compare the Supervisor_id to the Employee_id and the Employee_name to the supervisor name.