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

Database coding


The software engineering principles should be applied on database coding. Some of these principles are:

Database naming conventions

A naming convention describes how names are to be formulated. Naming conventions allow some information to be derived based on patterns, which helps the developer to easily search for and predict the database object names. Database naming conventions should be standardized across the organization. There is a lot of debate on how to name database objects. For example, some developers prefer to have prefixes or suffixes to distinguish the database object type from the names. For example, one could suffix a table or a view with tbl and vw respectively.

With regard to database object names, one should try to use descriptive names, and avoid acronyms and abbreviations if possible. Also, singular names are preferred, because a table is often mapped to an entity in a high programming language; thus, singular names lead to unified naming across the database...