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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned that PostgreSQL provides a very rich infrastructure for managing permissions associated with roles. Internally, PostgreSQL handles permissions on different database objects by means of ACLs, and every ACL contains information about the set of permissions, the users to whom permissions are granted, and the user who granted such permissions. In terms of tabular data, it is even possible to define column-based permissions and row-level permissions to exclude users from having access to a particular subset of data.

Permissions are granted by nested roles in a dynamically-inherited way or on-demand, leaving you the option to fine-tune how a role should exploit privileges.

With regard to security, we saw that PostgreSQL allows two different algorithms for password encryption, with SCRAM-SHA-256 being the most modern and robust. Lastly, when opportunely configured, the server can handle network connections via SSL, thereby encrypting all network traffic and...