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
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