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

Normalization


No database design is complete without discussing database anomalies, normal forms, and database normalization. As we have gone through the various design stages, we can now see how the final design will be formed based on these rules. The origin of database normalization was revealed by E.F. Codd in 1969, published in Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, June 1970.

In this work, normal forms were defined and each normal form was built on a previous rule and applies more stringent requirements to the design. In a religious normalization theory, there are five normal forms, for example, the Boyce-Codd normal form. But in reality, you will be amazed to know that only the first three forms are commonly used, and we will discuss them in the detail in this chapter.

A normalized database is easy to maintain and manage. All of this can be achieved using the first three normal forms. Databases that are designed without keeping in mind normalization will always have performance...