Book Image

Learn PostgreSQL - Second Edition

By : Luca Ferrari, Enrico Pirozzi
1 (2)
Book Image

Learn PostgreSQL - Second Edition

1 (2)
By: Luca Ferrari, Enrico Pirozzi

Overview of this book

The latest edition of this PostgreSQL book will help you to start using PostgreSQL from absolute scratch, helping you to quickly understand the internal workings of the database. With a structured approach and practical examples, go on a journey that covers the basics, from SQL statements and how to run server-side programs, to configuring, managing, securing, and optimizing database performance. This new edition will not only help you get to grips with all the recent changes within the PostgreSQL ecosystem but will also dig deeper into concepts like partitioning and replication with a fresh set of examples. The book is also equipped with Docker images for each chapter which makes the learning experience faster and easier. Starting with the absolute basics of databases, the book sails through to advanced concepts like window functions, logging, auditing, extending the database, configuration, partitioning, and replication. It will also help you seamlessly migrate your existing database system to PostgreSQL and contains a dedicated chapter on disaster recovery. Each chapter ends with practice questions to test your learning at regular intervals. By the end of this book, you will be able to install, configure, manage, and develop applications against a PostgreSQL database.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
20
Other Books You May Enjoy
21
Index

Users, Roles, and Database Security

PostgreSQL is a rock-solid database, and it pays great attention to security, providing a very rich infrastructure for handling permissions, privileges, and security policies. This chapter builds on the basic concepts introduced in Chapter 3, Managing Users and Connections, revisiting the role concept and extending knowledge with a particular focus on security and privileges granted to roles (a role can be both a user and a group of users). You will learn how to configure every aspect of a role to carefully manage security, from connection to accessing the data within a database.

PostgreSQL also provides a strong mechanism known as Row-Level Security (RLS), which allows a fine-grain definition of policies to mask out part of the data to certain users.

In this chapter, you will also learn about the Access Control List (ACL) and the way PostgreSQL handles permissions internally, which is the result of granting or revoking privileges. Finally...