Linux.conf.au 2003 | Abstracts

The Ins and Outs of PostgreSQL

Gavin Sherry

Bio

Paper

Audio

PostgreSQL is one of the most sophisticated open source relational databases. It provides excellent performance, a large number of features, adherence to international standards, ease of installation and maintenance and more.

This tutorial will:

1. Provide a brief introduction to the database itself
2. Survey the features of the database including: extensive support for SQL92 and SQL99, transactions and multiversion concurrency control, support for many hardware and software platforms, sub-selects, views, cursors, user-defined functions and types, and full backend extensibility
3. Show how to install, configure, start and stop the database server
4. Survey PostgreSQL's SQL extensions
5. Look at the C client library for Postgres, with examples of the usage of all functions
6. Explain procedural languages -- in particular, PL/PgSQL: the Postgres procedural language
7. Review the Server Programming Interface (SPI) for backend extensibility
8. Provide extensive examples of code where relevant