Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL

Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. The book starts with the introduction of relational databases with PostegreSQL. It then moves on to covering data definition language (DDL) with emphasis on PostgreSQL and common DDL commands supported by ANSI SQL. You will then learn the data manipulation language (DML), and advanced topics like locking and multi version concurrency control (MVCC). This will give you a very robust background to tune and troubleshoot your application. The book then covers the implementation of data models in the database such as creating tables, setting up integrity constraints, building indexes, defining views and other schema objects. Next, it will give you an overview about the NoSQL capabilities of PostgreSQL along with Hstore, XML, Json and arrays. Finally by the end of the book, you'll learn to use the JDBC driver and manipulate data objects in the Hibernate framework.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Learning PostgreSQL
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

An overview of PostgreSQL


PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org/) has many rich features. It provides enterprise level services including performance, unique features, and scalability. It has a very supportive community and very good documentation.

PostgreSQL history

The name PostgreSQL is derived from post-ingres database. PostgreSQL history could be summarized as follows:

  • Academia: University of California at Berkeley (UCB)

    • 1977-1985, the Ingres project: Michael Stonebraker created an RDBMS based on the formal relational model.

    • 1986-1994, postgres: Michael Stonebraker created postgres in order to support complex data types and the object relational model.

    • 1995, Postgres95: Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen changed the postgres POSTQUEL query language with an extended subset of SQL

  • Industry

    • 1996, PostgreSQL: Several developers dedicated a lot of labor and time to stabilize postgres95. The first open source version was released on January 29, 1997. With the introduction of new features, enhancements...