We are pleased to announce the availability of a new PostgreSQL book (PostgreSQL, Korry Douglas, Susan Douglas, Sams Publishing 2003, ISBN:0-7357-1257-3).
The book is about 750 pages long and was designed to be a comprehensive guide to PostgreSQL. You can see the table of contents (and download the sample code) at the book's website (http://www.conjectrix.com) We've spent more than a year putting this book together with the help of our publishers (New Riders and Sams Publishing) and the invaluable support of our technical reviewers, Peter Eisentraut, Barry Stinson, and Paul Dubois.
This is the first book to cover many of the lesser-documented features of PostgreSQL.
The first part of the book contains an introduction to SQL and PostgreSQL and a complete discussion of PostgreSQL data types. We've also included a chapter that covers PostgreSQL performance - in this chapter, we explain the factors that influence performance, show you how to measure and monitor this factors, and explain how the PostgreSQL server uses table statistics to guide optimization decisions. We explain each of the query operators that can appear in the output from an EXPLAIN command and tell you the type of query that will produce each operator.
For you developers out there, we have included chapters on PL/pgSQL, ecpg, C, C++, ODBC, JDBC, Perl, Python, PHP, and TCL/Tk. We've also included a chapter that shows how to create server-extension functions (including set-returning functions) and custom data types.
The last third of the book covers administration topics. There's a chapter on basic administration (how to create users, how to find the file that holds a particular table, installation, backup, etc.); this chapter includes a complete description of each configuration option. We've also included a separate chapter that covers internationalization and localization. The last chapter covers security - we show how to secure a PostgreSQL installation against intruders and how to use groups, views, and privileges to create a secure environment within your server.
We welcome comments and hope that you enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed writing it.