Book Image

Learn PostgreSQL

By : Luca Ferrari, Enrico Pirozzi
Book Image

Learn PostgreSQL

By: Luca Ferrari, Enrico Pirozzi

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the fastest-growing open source object-relational database management systems (DBMS) in the world. As well as being easy to use, it’s scalable and highly efficient. In this book, you’ll explore PostgreSQL 12 and 13 and learn how to build database solutions using it. Complete with hands-on tutorials, this guide will teach you how to achieve the right database design required for a reliable environment. You'll learn how to install and configure a PostgreSQL server and even manage users and connections. The book then progresses to key concepts of relational databases, before taking you through the Data Definition Language (DDL) and commonly used DDL commands. To build on your skills, you’ll understand how to interact with the live cluster, create database objects, and use tools to connect to the live cluster. You’ll then get to grips with creating tables, building indexes, and designing your database schema. Later, you'll explore the Data Manipulation Language (DML) and server-side programming capabilities of PostgreSQL using PL/pgSQL, before learning how to monitor, test, and troubleshoot your database application to ensure high-performance and reliability. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with the Postgres database and be able to set up your own PostgreSQL instance and use it to build robust solutions.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started
5
Section 2: Interacting with the Database
12
Section 3: Administering the Cluster
20
Section 4: Replication
23
Section 5: The PostegreSQL Ecosystem
Users, Roles, and Database Security

PostgreSQL is a rock solid database, and it pays great attention to security, providing a very rich infrastructure to handle 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 attached to roles (both users and groups). You will learn how to configure every aspect of a role to carefully manage security, from connection to accessing the data within a database.

However, PostgreSQL goes far beyond this and provides a strong mechanism known as Role Level Security, 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...