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Thread: PG Books

PG Books

From
Paul Lambert
Date:
I've come across a couple of books on PG that appear interesting and was
wondering if others have read them and what their thoughts are. (Excuse
me if this topic has already been covered previously)

Practical PostgreSQL - Command Prompt
PostgreSQL - Bruce Momjian

I know Bruce and the CP folks are regular posters here and I am
certainly aware of their in depth knowledge on PG so as far as knowing
that the books would be reliable in the information they give I have no
problems there.

At the moment my usage of PG is fairly basic, a bunch of tables that
contains a replication of data in our primary application which is
loaded by a single application and used by our customers with MS Access,
Crystal Reports and other tools to generate reports. I.e. in effect to
our customers it's a read only database and any data being put in has
already been subjected to constraint testing etc by the primary (non PG)
database so I haven't set up any foreign keys, triggers/functions,
views, sequences etc. Really the only thing in use is basic data in
tables with some indexes to make reports quicker.

I want to start expanding the usage and getting into the guts of proper
performance tuning (right now all PG installations are using the default
parameters - the only thing that has been changed is the pg_hba file to
allow access) and these books look like they might be worth reading to
understand a bit more about how all this works.

Can anyone who has read the books let me know if you have found them to
be valuable reference tools for someone who is relatively novice at PG
(but not at databases in general) - Note: Praise from the books authors
will be considered marginally bias and therefore untrustworthy :)

I know, I could have written a two line email asking this question, but
sometimes I like to go on and on and on and on.

Thanks for your input though.

--
Paul Lambert
Database Administrator
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Re: PG Books

From
Guillaume Lelarge
Date:
Paul Lambert a écrit :
> I've come across a couple of books on PG that appear interesting and was
> wondering if others have read them and what their thoughts are. (Excuse
> me if this topic has already been covered previously)
>
> Practical PostgreSQL - Command Prompt
> PostgreSQL - Bruce Momjian
>
> [...]
> Can anyone who has read the books let me know if you have found them to
> be valuable reference tools for someone who is relatively novice at PG
> (but not at databases in general) - Note: Praise from the books authors
> will be considered marginally bias and therefore untrustworthy :)
>

I've read both of them and found them really interesting 3 or 4 years
ago. Sadly, they are quite old ("PostgreSQL: Introduction and Concepts"
published in 2000, 2002 for "Practical PostgreSQL"). You may better look
at this list :
   http://www.postgresql.org/docs/books/

"Beginning Databases with PostgreSQL" is a really good intro.

Regards.


--
Guillaume.
<!-- http://abs.traduc.org/
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      http://docs.postgresqlfr.org/ -->

Re: PG Books

From
Listmail
Date:

> loaded by a single application and used by our customers with MS Access,

    From by previous job where we had an Access based backoffice application,
you might want to learn enough to be ready to switch to something better
(ie postgres) when you feel the need.
    Access is a booby trap setup by Microsoft to sell SQL server. It will
work well up to a certain point, then die miserably (some of our web pages
were taking minutes to load !).
    When this happens many people complain and you usually buy SQL server to
ease the pain.
    Or, as we did, you ditch the MS stuff and switch to other tools.
    I wasn't in charge of this, so can't say more, but beware of Access.

Re: PG Books

From
Rich Shepard
Date:
On Tue, 1 May 2007, Paul Lambert wrote:

> I've come across a couple of books on PG that appear interesting and was
> wondering if others have read them and what their thoughts are. (Excuse me
> if this topic has already been covered previously)
>
> Practical PostgreSQL - Command Prompt
> PostgreSQL - Bruce Momjian

   These are both excellent, but outdated. The second edition of Douglas and
Douglas, "PostgreSQL" is excellent and still useful since it covers the 8.x
series of releases.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |    The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.        |          Accelerator(TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517      Fax: 503-667-8863

Re: PG Books

From
Paul Lambert
Date:
Listmail wrote:
>
>
>> loaded by a single application and used by our customers with MS Access,
>
>     From by previous job where we had an Access based backoffice
> application, you might want to learn enough to be ready to switch to
> something better (ie postgres) when you feel the need.

I think you misunderstand what I was describing.

We do use Postgres, our customers use Access as a report generating tool
running off the PG backend. That part I'm not concerned with, we merely
supply the database - which yes was in SQL Server, but I migrated it to
PG late last year.

>     Access is a booby trap setup by Microsoft to sell SQL server. It
> will work well up to a certain point, then die miserably (some of our
> web pages were taking minutes to load !).
>     When this happens many people complain and you usually buy SQL
> server to ease the pain.
>     Or, as we did, you ditch the MS stuff and switch to other tools.
>     I wasn't in charge of this, so can't say more, but beware of Access.

We leave it up to out customers to decide what reporting tool to use,
most use access for its simple report generation, some use Crystal
Reports, others build web pages that interface to the backend database.

>
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--
Paul Lambert
Technical Support Team Leader and Database Administrator
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Re: PG Books

From
Paul Lambert
Date:
Guillaume Lelarge wrote:
> Paul Lambert a écrit :
>> I've come across a couple of books on PG that appear interesting and
>> was wondering if others have read them and what their thoughts are.
>> (Excuse me if this topic has already been covered previously)
>>
>> Practical PostgreSQL - Command Prompt
>> PostgreSQL - Bruce Momjian
>>
>> [...] Can anyone who has read the books let me know if you have found
>> them to be valuable reference tools for someone who is relatively
>> novice at PG (but not at databases in general) - Note: Praise from the
>> books authors will be considered marginally bias and therefore
>> untrustworthy :)
>>
>
> I've read both of them and found them really interesting 3 or 4 years
> ago. Sadly, they are quite old ("PostgreSQL: Introduction and Concepts"
> published in 2000, 2002 for "Practical PostgreSQL"). You may better look
> at this list :
>   http://www.postgresql.org/docs/books/
>
> "Beginning Databases with PostgreSQL" is a really good intro.
>
> Regards.
>
>

Ahh, thanks for that link, I'll check them out :)

--
Paul Lambert
Technical Support Team Leader and Database Administrator
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