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

Exploring the PGXN client

The PGXN client is an external application, written in Python, that works as a command-line interface to PGXN. The application, named pgxnclient, works by means of commands, which are actions such as install, download, uninstall, and so on, allowing a database administrator to instrument PGXN and work with extensions.



To some extent, pgxnclient works the same as the command cpan (or cpanm) for Perl, zef for Raku, pip for Python, and so on.
Being an external application means that pgxnclient is not distributed with PostgreSQL, and therefore you need to install it on your machines before you can use it. Installing pgxnclient is not mandatory in order to use PostgreSQL extensions, but it can make your life a lot easier.

In the following subsections, you will see how to install pgxnclient on main Unix and Unix-like operating systems, but before that, it is important to let you know that, once installed, you will find two executables on your system: pgxn and pgxnclient...