Hooray! I finished reading “Learn PostgreSQL” book – a 700 page brick 😉 It took over a month of waking up at 6am reading, making notes in my notebooks and summaries on this blog.
I was exposed to many new concepts and feature of Postgres that I was not familiar with before. Now I am looking forward to leverage full power of Postgres in my GADM project and at my workplace. Especially I want to experiment with partitioning, query tuning, backups and replication.
I would give this book 6.5 out of 10 points. I like the selection of topics and the fact that this book is both practical and theoretical. Nevertheless, I would prefer if it had more deep dives and fewer step-by-step instructions. The book is feels verbose in some places. I feel like it could have been shrunk to 500 pages and still cover all the topics.
Last chapter of the book mentions few useful Postgres extensions:
– pg_trgm – a tool for indexing text fields. Native Postgres indexes can support only LIKE something% queries where search phrase starts with exact value. The pg_trgm can index LIKE %something% queries by building trigrams and building GIST or GIN indexes.
– pgbackrest – a backup automation tool that can store the backups in the cloud buckets. It supports PITR, backup encryption and much more.
– postgres_fdw – extension for handling foreign data wrappers. It enables connection to external data sources like other Postgres instances, MySql or NonSql databases. Once connection is established you can query remote tables as if they are local.
– pgloader – Allows migrating from other databases into Postgres.