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 logical backups

PostgreSQL ships with all the required tools to perform a logical backup and restore. Many operating systems, including FreeBSD and GNU/Debian, provide scripts and wrappers for the PostgreSQL backup and restore tools to ease the system administrator in scheduling backups and restores. Such scripts and wrappers will not be explained here. For more information, consider reading your operating system's PostgreSQL package documentation.

There are three main applications involved in backup and restore pg_dump, pg_dumpall, and pg_restore. As you can imagine from their names, pg_dump and pg_dumpall are related to extracting (dumping) the content of a database, thus creating a backup, while pg_restore is their counterpart and allows you to restore an existing backup.

PostgreSQL does not require any special "backup" permissions. In order to perform a backup, the user must have all the required grants to access individual objects, such as tables...