It’s free.
It’s available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.
Its SQL implementation closely follows ANSI standards.
It’s widely used for analytics and data mining, so finding help online
from peers is easy.
Its geospatial extension, PostGIS, lets you
analyze geometric data and
perform mapping functions.
It’s available in several variants, such as Amazon Redshift and Green-
plum, which focus on processing huge data sets.
It’s a common choice for web applications, including those powered by
the popular web frameworks Django and Ruby on Rails.
Of course, you can also
use another database system, such as Microsoft
SQL Server or MySQL; many code examples in this book translate easily to
either SQL implementation. However, some examples, especially later in the
book, do not, and you’ll need to search online for equivalent solutions.
Where appropriate, I’ll note whether an example
code follows the ANSI
SQL standard and may be portable to other systems or whether it’s specific
to PostgreSQL.
Installing PostgreSQL
You’ll start by installing the PostgreSQL database and the graphical
administrative tool pgAdmin, which is software
that makes it easy to manage
your database, import and export data, and write queries.
One great benefit of working with PostgreSQL is that regardless of
whether you work on Windows, macOS,
or Linux, the open source
community has made it easy to get PostgreSQL up and running. The
following sections outline installation for all three operating systems as of
this writing, but options might change as new versions are released. Check
the documentation noted in each section as well as the GitHub repository
with the book’s resources; I’ll maintain the files
with updates and answers to
frequently asked questions.
NOTE