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 advanced tools so that we can perform backups and restorations. Backups are important because, even in a battle-tested and high-quality product such as PostgreSQL, things can go wrong: often, the users may accidentally damage their data, but other times, the hardware or the software could fail miserably. Being able to restore data, partially or fully, is therefore very important and every database administrator should carefully plan backup strategies.

We also learned that PostgreSQL ships with tools for both logical and physical backups. Logical backups are taken by means of reading the data from the database itself, by means of ordinary SQL interactions; physical backups are taken by means of cloning the PGDATA directory either by using operating system tools or PostgreSQL ad hoc solutions. Restoration is performed by specific tools in the case of logical backups, and by the database self-healing mechanism in the case of physical...