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

Understanding basic concepts

Logical replication is a method that we can use to replicate data based on the concept of identity replication. REPLICA IDENTITY is a parameter present in table management commands (such as CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE); this parameter is used by PostgreSQL to obtain additional information within WAL segments to recognize which tuples have been eliminated and which tuples have been updated. The REPLICA IDENTITY parameter can take four values:

  • DEFAULT
  • USING INDEX index_name
  • FULL
  • NOTHING

The concept behind logical replication is to pass the logic of the commands executed on the master machine to the server and not the exact copy of the blocks to be replicated byte by byte. At the heart of logical replication, there is a reverse engineering process that, starting from the WAL segments and using a logical decoding process, is able to extrapolate the original SQL commands and pass them on to the replication machine using a logical decoding process.

Let's...