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
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21
Index

Exploring data types

As users, we have already had the opportunity to experience the power and versatility of server-side functions – for example, in Chapter 5, Advanced Statements, we used a query similar to the following:

forumdb=> select * from categories where upper(title) like 'A%';
 pk | title |         description    
----+-------+------------------------------
  4 | A.I   | Machine Learning discussions
(1 row)

In this piece of code, the upper function is a server-side function; this function turns all the characters of a string into uppercase. In this chapter, we will acquire the knowledge to be able to write functions such as the upper function that we called in the preceding query.

In this section, we’ll talk about data types. We will briefly mention the standard types managed by PostgreSQL and how to create new ones.

The concept of extensibility

What is extensibility? Extensibility is PostgreSQL’s ability to extend...