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

Introducing extensions

SQL is a declarative language that allows you to create and manipulate objects, as well as data. You can group SQL statements into scripts so that you can run the scripts in a more predictable and reproducible way. However, such scripts are seen by PostgreSQL as a sequence of unrelated commands, that is, you are responsible for correlating such commands into appropriate scripts. Things get even worse when you have to deal with foreign languages or binary libraries; the cluster knows nothing about your aim and how every single object is related to each other. Luckily, extensions help in getting order out of chaos.

An extension is a packaged set of files that can be installed into the cluster in order to provide more functionalities, therefore to "extend" the current cluster set of features.

An extension can be something general, like a new data type, a new index type, or a service to send emails directly from within PostgreSQL, or it can be something really...