Learn PostgreSQL

Build and manage high-performance database solutions using PostgreSQL 12 and 13

What is this book about?

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.

This book covers the following exciting features:

Understand how users and connections are managed by running a PostgreSQL instance
Interact with transaction boundaries using server-side programming
Identify bottlenecks to maintain your database efficiently
Create and manage extensions to add new functionalities to your cluster
Choose the best index type for each situation

If you feel this book is for you, get your copy today!

Book Outline

This Postgres book is for anyone interested in learning about the PostgreSQL database from scratch. Anyone looking to build robust data warehousing applications and scale the database for high-availability and performance using the latest features of PostgreSQL will also find this book useful. Although prior knowledge of PostgreSQL is not required, familiarity with databases is expected.

The book is divided into five main parts. The following is a list of the book chapters.

Part 1

Introduction to PostgreSQL
Getting to know your cluster
Managing Users and Connections

Part 2

Basic Statements
Advanced Statements
Window Functions
Server Side Programming
Triggers and Rules
Partitioning

Part 3

Users, Roles and Database Security
Transactions, MVCC, WALs and Checkpoints
Extending the database: the Extension ecosystem
Indexes and Performance Optimization
Logging and Auditing
Backup and Restore
Configuration and Monitoring

Part 4

Physical Replication
Logical Replication

Part 5

Usefult tools and useful extensions
Towards PostgreSQL 13

Chapters Content

Every chapter will have the following main structure:

a What you will learn bullet list that summarize what the reader will learn thru the chapter;
a What you need to know bullet list that reminds the user basic knowledge required to fully understand the contents of the chapter;
an Abstract that introduces the chapter content at glance;
a Conclusions section that provides a summary of the chapter and focus on the main concepts;
a References section with links to documentation, articles and external resources.

Content of this repository

This repository contains ongoing stuff related to the book, including code examples.

Naming conventions used in this repository

Every chapter has its own folder named after the chapter number, for instance Chapter01 for the very first chapter.

In order to ease the execution of the code examples by readers, every chapter will have a set of source scripts that the reader can immediatly load into her database.

Every file is named after the its type, for example .sql for an SQL script or a collection of SQL statements.

Pictures

Any picture will be named with the pattern Chapter<CC>_picture<PP>.<type> where:

CC is the chapter number;
PP is the picture number as listed within the chapter;
type is a suffix related to the picture file type (e.g., png for a Portable Network Graphic image).

Images could appear differently from the printed book due to graphical needs.

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book.

Command prompts

In the book code listings and examples, the command prompts are one of the two that follows:

a $ stands for an Unix shell prompt (like Bourne, Bash, Zsh);
a forumdb=> stands for the psql(1) command prompt when an active connection to the database is opened.

As an example, the following is a command issued on the operating system:

$ sudo service postgresql restart

while the following is a query issued within an active database connection:

forumdb=> SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;

Administrative/Superusers command prompts

Whenere there is the need to execute a command or a statement with administrative privileges, the command prompt will reflect it using a # sign as the end part of the command prompt. For example, the following is an SQL statement issued as PostgreSQL administrator:

forumdb=# SELECT pg_terminate_backend( 987 );

ùPlease note the presence of the # in the forumdb=# prompt, as opposed to the > sign in the normal user forumdb=> prompt.

In the case a command on the operating system must be run with superuser (root) privileges, the command will be run via sudo(1), as in:

$ sudo initdb -D /postgres/12

and therefore in this case the command prompt will not change, rather the presence of the sudo(1) command indicates root privileges are required.

Creating the example database

The book is built over an example database that implements an online forum storage. In order to be able to execute any example of any chapter, the reader has to initialize the forum database.

The scripts in the folder setup, executed in lexicographically order, implement the example database and setup the environment so that other examples can be run against the database.

In particular, in order to get the database structure as shown in Chapter 4 and the followings, you have to executed something has follows:

psql -U <your-username> -h <database-host> < setup/00-forum-database.sql

where

your-username is a PostgreSQL username of choice;
database-host is the host the database is running on, if different from localhost.

The end result will be to have the forumdb created and populated with tables. You can also invoke the script interactively from within a psql connection, such as:

psql -U <your-username> -h <database-host> template1

template1=> \i setup/-00-forum-database.sql

The simplest form to get the example database up and running is the following one (assuming you are running PostgreSQL locally):

$ psql -U postgres   template1 -c 'CREATE ROLE forumdb_user WITH LOGIN CREATEDB;'
$ psql -U forum_user template1 < setup/00-forum-database.sql

Software and Hardware List

Chapter	Software required	OS required
1	PostgreSQL 12 - 13	Linux OS / FreeBSD

Get to Know the Authors

Luca Ferrari has been passionate about computer science since the Commodore 64 era, and today holds a master's degree (with honors) and a Ph.D. from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He has written several research papers, technical articles, and book chapters. In 2011, he was named an Adjunct Professor by Nipissing University. An avid Unix user, he is a strong advocate of open source, and in his free time, he collaborates with a few projects. He met PostgreSQL back in release 7.3; he was a founder and former president of the Italian PostgreSQL Community (ITPUG). He also talks regularly at technical conferences and events and delivers professional training.

Enrico Pirozzi has been passionate about computer science since he was a 13-year-old, his first computer was a Commodore 64, and today he holds a master's degree from the University of Bologna. He has participated as a speaker at national and international conferences on PostgreSQL. He met PostgreSQL back in release 7.2, he was a co-founder of the first PostgreSQL Italian mailing list and the first Italian PostgreSQL website, and he talks regularly at technical conferences and events and delivers professional training. Right now, he is employed as a PostgreSQL database administrator at Nexteam (Zucchetti Group S.p.a.).

Suggestions and Feedback

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Errata

Page 5: the sentence "All the SQL examples can be run using the psql program or using the GUI tool pdAdmin." should be "All the SQL examples can be run using the psql program or using the GUI tool pgAdmin."
Page 42 (The template databases): in the code section the command shown is psql -l. Unluckily, the first line of command output, that reports List of databases, has been placed on the right side of the very same line of the command. In order to reproduce the command, you need to copy and execute only the psql -l command (reported errata CA162683 on 2021-09-30);
Page 82 (Dropping databases, first paragraph): to drop a table should be to drop a database
Page 122 (Using FULL OUTER JOIN, point 2): j_tags_posts should be j_posts_tags
Page 143 (first bullet point): let's create a table named inserted_post should be let's create a table named inserted_posts;
Page 147, in the section entitled The ROW NUMBER function, the query placed in the book does not has the column row_number shown in the query output. The correct query to use is select category,count(*) over w , row_number() over w from posts WINDOW w as (partition by category) order by category;. that reports the output as shown in the section output.
Page 152 (LAST_VALUE Window Function): the query select category, row_number() over w, title, last_value(title) over w from posts WINDOW w as (partition by category order by category) order by category; should be select category, row_number () over w, title, last_value (title) over w from posts WINDOW w as (partition by category order by title) order by category;. For more information about this error, see the issue #6
Page 174 (section Chars with fixed-length data types): the query reported in the example 3 is missing the FROM clause, and should be select pk,tag,length(tag),octet_length(tag),char_length(tag) FROM new_tags;
Page 271 (heading): Partition Maintenance should be a second level heading within the section g declarative partitioning;
Page 581 (Section 5, heading): The PostegreSQL System should be The PostgreSQL System

About GNU Debian and Ubuntu Repositories

The installation example in the Chapter 1, with particular regard to the section Installing PostgreSQL 12 on GNU/Linux Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives refers to the adoption of the PostgreSQL Global Development Groupd (PGDG) repositories, as specified at the first step in the example.

Since PostgreSQL 10, both the GNU Debian and Ubuntu operating system families have renamed the PostgreSQL Contrib module removing the version number suffix, therefore the right package to install is postgresql-contrib instead of the one presented in the installation instruction in the first chapter, wrongly named postgresql-contrib-12.

The package postgresql-contrib-12 is a virtual package that refers to postgresql-12, threfore to the whole server and not to the contrib module.

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