PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL (or Postgres for short) is an open source relational database management systems (RDBMS). In nearly all cases the main application interface to an RDBMS is SQL, the standardised language for accessing relational databases. But beyond SQL every RDBMS needs a lot of additional tools to handle the installation process as well as maintenance and optimization tasks. As such tasks act very closely to the implementation of each RDBMS, they greatly differ from RDBMS to RDBMS - unlike SQL.
The purpose of this book is an introduction to the PostgreSQL specific aspects like its architecture, installing procedure, maintenance and optimization tasks. Thus it is primarily aimed to database administrators. But it is only a starting point in these objectives and many topics are omitted. For a complete treatment we recommend to get through professional training courses offered by many consulting companies. And don't forget: there is a great and complete documentation of all the stuff we try to explain in the Wikibook on hand. Additionally some special topics are summarized in the PostgreSQL wiki.
The SQL interface is out of the scope of the Wikibook on hand. If you are interested in this specific topic, you may want to refer to the Wikibook SQL, which describes the SQL standard independent from any RDBMS implementation. It's a good starting point for PostgreSQL as its implementation of SQL is very close to the standard.
The Wikibook on hand is based on PostgreSQL version 9.5.
Chapters
Fundamentals
- Featured Platforms
- Download, Installation, First Steps
- Glossary / Prominent Terms
- Architecture
- Managing the Instance
- Configuration
- Multiversion Concurrency Control (MVCC) and Vacuum
- Write-Ahead-Log files (WAL)
Special Topics
- DBA Tools (psql, pgAdmin, phpAdmin, ...)
- Client-Server Communication: The Client Site
- Client-Server Communication: The Server Site
- Security within the Database: Roles, Users, Privileges
- Backup & Recovery
- Replication
- Partitioning
- Tablespace
- Upgrade
Extensions
Topics for Application Developers
See also
- Wikibook: SQL
- Wikipedia: PostgreSQL
- Wikibook: Converting MySQL to PostgreSQL
- PostgeSQL Wiki: Converting to PostgreSQL (DB2, Oracle, MySQL, ...)