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

Using foreign data wrappers and the postgres_fdw extension

This section will provide a brief introduction to what foreign data wrappers are. Foreign data wrappers allow us to access data that is hosted on an external database as if it was kept on a normal local table. We can connect PostgreSQL to various data sources, we can connect PostgreSQL to another PostgreSQL server, or we can connect PostgreSQL to another data source that can be relational or non-relational. Once the foreign data wrapper is connected, PostgreSQL is able to read the remote table as if it were local. There are foreign data wrappers for well-known databases such as Oracle and MySQL, and there are foreign data wrappers for lesser-known systems. A complete list of foreign data wrappers available for PostgreSQL is available at https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers.

In this section, we will consider an example using the postgresql_fdw foreign data wrapper, which is used to connect a PostgreSQL server...