Re: books/sites for someone really learning PG's advanced features?

On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 11:03:30PM -0700, Miles Keaton wrote:
> I'm switching to PostgreSQL from MySQL.  Using the SAMs book called
> PostgreSQL which has been great to skim the surface of the
> differerences.
>
> I had never even heard of things like triggers, views, and foreign keys before.
>
> Any recommended books or websites (or exercises) that would really
> help someone get to know not just the basics of how these advanced
> features work, but some real in-depth insight into how to USE them for
> real work?
>
> (It's always hard to get used to actually using features you never
> knew existed before.)

Hi Miles,

It sounds like you're in the same place I was in 18 months ago. I
learned SQL (as it were) by reading the MySQL manual, and then I read
an advocacy post somewhere and realized that I was re-implementing in my
middleware all the stuff that the DBMS should've been doing for me
already.

The way I learned Postgres was by reading the documentation
cover-to-cover (<http://www.postgresql.org/docs>). There are lots of
really good examples in there on all the features you mention, but I
seem to remember that they were scattered all over the place, and
anyway I found the docs to be a pretty easy read. I never bothered
with any of the Postgres-specific books because, as I understood it,
there was nothing on the market at the time that covered the latest
version.

Actually, the feature I had the hardest time learning were server-side
functions (including triggers), because I couldn't find a good
interactive programming environment with syntax highlighting and all
the rest to test them out with.

Now, what really helped me to understand how to *query* databases was
the book _An Introduction to Database Systems_ by Chris Date, but that
book might distract you from learning Postgres, if you're an idealist,
because it really finds a lot of reasons to disparage SQL.

- Jeremy