chapter one
1 Meeting Postgres
This chapter covers
- Understanding what “just use Postgres” means
- Starting Postgres and connecting from a command-line tool
- Generating mock data using built-in database capabilities and running a few basic queries
PostgreSQL (or simply Postgres, as most people call it) is one of the fastest-growing relational and general-purpose databases. As a relational database, it natively supports Structured Query Language (SQL) and is a popular choice for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads that process user requests with low latency while guaranteeing data consistency and integrity even if a database server crashes in the middle of an operation execution. You encounter OLTP systems daily when you, for example, book a flight to your next vacation destination, pay for groceries at a local supermarket, or share a new post on social media.