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

Managing your cluster

From an operating system point of view, PostgreSQL is a service that can be started, stopped, and, of course, monitored. As you saw in the previous chapter, usually when you install PostgreSQL, you also get a set of operating system-specific tools and scripts to integrate PostgreSQL with your operating system service management (for example, systemd service files).

In particular, PostgreSQL ships with a tool called pg_ctl that helps in managing the cluster and the related running processes. This section introduces you to the basic usage of pg_ctl and to the processes that you can encounter in a running cluster.

pg_ctl

The pg_ctl command-line utility is a tool that allows you to perform different actions on a cluster, mainly initialize it, start it, restart and stop it, and so on. pg_ctl accepts the command to execute as the first argument, followed by other specific arguments—the main commands are as follows:

  • start, stop, and restart execute the corresponding...