Customer Reviews

PostgreSQL: Introduction and Concepts

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is the first book I've seen on PostgreSQL. It's been in progress for sometime, and had been available in electronic form. However, the print version is sure to be a gem. It contains information needed by anyone trying to get a handle on PostgreSQL, beginner or advanced. The folks starting to use PostgreSQL will have alot of examples on standard SQL for database access, including transaction support. The more advanced users will appreciate the level of detail including how PostgreSQL differs from standard SQL (Good news is that this isn't by much) and integration with other tools. It also has good information about transaction requirements and ways they are implemented within the context of PostgreSQL, as well as how to increase performance. I gave it four stars out of five only because I thought it could have used more administration details and hints. Though the administration section in the book is still a good read, and it is clearly a topic that can take another book to complete. In short, I highly recommend the book for those wanting to learn more about this open-source database.

It's an odd commentary on the open source movement that, while open source code seems sophisticated and reliable -- as a result of the many hands working on it -- open source documentation, as a general rule, sucks. I believe that this book is the _first_ printed book on PostgreSQL. As such, the author is to be commended for his effort at collecting a great deal of useful Postgres info in one place, helping readers find the essential knowledge buried in the sea of online documentation.

The book's title says "Introduction and Concepts", letting you know this isn't an advanced treatise on Postgres. The first half of the book handily summarizes SQL and then dives into hands-on PostgreSQL, run interactively via the psql interactive utility. This is a nice way to give readers direct experience with Postgres, but it is also automatically limiting because readers never learn how to use Postgres in the context of an application. There is a chapter on programming interfaces, but it covers ten languages in ten pages, which isn't enough to impart any practical Postgres programming skills.

The second half of the book is a verbatim replica of the SQL Commands reference from the official Postgres user's guide. It's handy to have in the book, but it's hard to give the author any credit for simply pouring this stuff into his book unchanged. I would have liked to see some useful annotations from the author, reflecting his obviously considerable experience with Postgres.

I gave the book four stars in part because the author is breaking new ground by carving out a niche with publishers for future PostgreSQL books. I'm hoping a second edition of his book comes soon, replacing (or augmenting) those 250 pages of reference material with concrete programming examples in a variety of languages and interesting comments on usage. In the meantime, this book is a very nice primer for our new employees who have to come up to speed on PostgreSQL quickly.

I teach Software Engineering for Internet Applications. Our students are free to use whatever ACID-compliant RDBMS they prefer. Since PostgreSQL is more or less the only open-source candidate (unless you count the RDBMS open-sourced by SAP), PostgreSQL is our students' third most popular choice (after Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server). The students using this book have a horrible time picking data types because the book doesn't provide fundamental information, or at least none that we could find. Want to know how long a character string can be? How precise a timestamp is? You won't find the answers in this book.

First of all, this is not a book about Postgresql database, it's a book about introduction to SQL!

Considering the title, it should at least give some direction about how to install/configure, list the gotcha's, do's, don't's, etc. But this book starts with the assumption that you already have the database installed and ready to run, server and all.

I'm not kidding, it's actually listed in one of the first sections in the book that a running server is required to read this book. How does this match the "Introduction and Concepts" title???

A little pointer to the author if he's reading this, in his next book or second edition of this book, he should: 1. Explain where PostgreSQL fits in modern distributed architectures 2. Why would I want to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL if I'm developing a J2EE application, how about CORBA? 3. How do I take advantage of the OO features of PostgreSQL to shorten the development time

This book is a very good reference work. I expect the major usefulness will be to for programmers (both C programmers making modifications to the source and also for SQL programmers). Another reviewer said it was mostly a padding of the FAQ (which is 8 pages, developer FAQ + 18 pages for the general FAQ) whereas the book is well over 400 pages. I don't really see any sort of connection there. Suggested improvements: Add a long section on installation. The book does not mention running the regression tests. The regression tests can be difficult to configure, and this is especially so under Cygwin on NT or Win2K. Also, maintenance operations and bulk copy operations should be much, much larger with copious examples.

If you plan to program in PostgreSQL or modify the PostgreSQL program, you must buy this book. Also highly recommended is the somewhat obscure paper: "Enhacement of the ANSI SQL Implementation of PostgreSQL" by Gottlob & Seyr.

PostgreSQL is the ONLY fully functional SQL implementation with a TRULY open license. I hope to see more fine efforts like this in the future.

We are involved in CF, vb and php projects and needed an alternative to another Oracle license. We turned to PostgreSQL and soon discovered we were making heavy going of the online docs. This book has quickly answered our functional questions, helping us with transactions, sequences etc. So far everything we've needed we've found right away.

I wish they were more specific about field max sizes - oracle for example is very clera and very constrained (4k limits on inmserts to varchar fields for example). These limits appear to be arbritarily large as we have tested without overrunning them.

ALso we have of course the source files for postgres, so questions like that can be answered with some familiarity with the code. Postgres isn't Oracle and it certainly wont scale like Oracle, but for web projects witha few thousand records and a few dozen simultaneous users it, and this book, are perfect.

This book took me from being a SQL novice (let alone a PostgreSQL novice) to being able to being able to use PostgreSQL for business apps.

I'm not quite sure why some reviewers knocked it. It has much more content than the FAQ, good examples and a reference section.

One reviewer knocked the reference section, claiming the book was half full of appendices... in fact the reference section is what you most often go to the book for after you've worked through the basic concepts in the first section.

I think the layout is slightly odd - the examples of commands and their results are grouped together in sections that are usually a page or two ahead of the text that explains them. So you spend a bit of time flicking pages to see examples. But once you get the hang of this style it's not exactly the biggest pain in the world.

I think it's a very good book, one that took me from being a SQL beginner yet is still useful as a day to day reference.

Lee

The book is 453 pages of which 220 are simply manual pages in print. Of the other 233 pages about 105 of them are basic SQL syntax review. So now you have 128 pages left. Many of those are information about databases in general, such as what are indexes and why are they used. The amount of pure PostgreSQL specific information is very limited. The book is in no way worth.... You are basically paying for manual pages. Save your money and download the documentation for PostgreSQL which is very well written. This book is very well written and easy to follow. There is nothing techincally wrong with the book. Frequently, however, you will see the statement "See the manual pages for more information". Save yourself the money and see the manual pages.

This book certainly covers all the basics for those wishing to learn PostgreSQL - However:

1. Nearly half of the book is Appendices. Maybe OK if you don't want to read the free docs on the computer screen.

2. Written like an encyclopedia. Ever try reading one of those? The lack of user exercises is particularly irritating.

...

Get the Wrox book instead of this one and you will be richer and happier ...

PostgreSQL is a complex product based on its lineage from Ingress and Illustra. Unfortunately, this book does little to draw the shrouds of mystery from the product. Half the book is devoted to the standard SQL95 commands. About a quarter of the remainder describes PostgresSQL's syntactical enhancements to that standard.

The book provides almost no information about the internals of PostgresSQL. Although system tables are named at one point, there's no description at all of the data contained in these all-important tables. There's no discussion of the query optimizer, nor any meaningful discussion of PostgreSQL's locking schemes.

This book is, at best, a primer. We eagerly await a book that delves beyond the surface of PostgreSQL into those features of interest to a Database Administrator.