Book Review — Instant PostgreSQL Starter

Following up on the positive experience I had recently with another of Packt Publishing's "Instant" titles for Postgres, I picked up a copy of Instant PostgreSQL Starter and dove right in.  (And I must say I'm enjoying these short format books.)

The first major section of the book seems targeted at someone with absolutely no experience, or perhaps minimal experience, with databases whatsoever.  Yet I still found it useful, as I'm coming to Postgres from an Oracle direction.  Simply having to walk through the installation process, perform the basic table creation, inserts, updates, queries, etc. that you will be walked through provided an easy way of becoming more familiar with the nuances of the database and its GUI admin tool, pgAdmin3.

As a brief aside — I think the author's choice of going down a fairly platform agnostic path by utilizing +EnterpriseDB's installer and interacting with the database through pgAdmin3, rather than psql in a shell, was a good one.  It provides a one size fits all approach for anyone to get up and running without having to delve into the nuances of shells on different systems, various installation methods, and so on.

What I think was the most valuable portion of the book for me was "Top 9 features you need to know about", which gives an overview of such topics as hashing passwords for storage, XML in Postgres, and full-text search, to name a few.  For someone coming to Postgres from another database, it's learning about these kinds of features that truly help you get up to speed a bit faster.  And I appreciate being able to get a brief overview of these topics in order to simply know about them and how they work, without becoming an expert in any (just yet!).

Book Review — Instant PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to

I recently was fortunate to receive an ePub copy of “Instant PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to” from Packt Publishing for review. The topic obviously high on the list of skills any DBA must master. And given my still relatively recent foray into the realm of Postgres from Oracle, quickly getting up to speed on this is certainly a top priority for me.

From the outset, the book does not disappoint. Like any of you, I'm sure, I have a ridiculous number of tech books in my library. This, however, is my first publication from Packt. And I must say, I definitely enjoyed the short, directly to the point format. I'll likely be taking a look at other Packt titles if for no other reason than that.

Author Shaun Thomas had my immediate gratitude and admiration for providing an extremely quick, concise method for creating a reasonably large database to work through the methods presented. Again, as a relative newcomer to Postgres, with no Postgres instances in use at my organization, I found this invaluable.

And without any delay, you will roll right into the basics of backup of your databases. Full, partial, data only, schema info, specific tables... it's all there within the first few pages. In only a few minutes after beginning the book, you have enough information to have a backup of your database underway. Well done.

At the time of this writing, I have not yet made it to the following chapters on more advanced topics. But there is no question I'm looking forward to them given my experience so far.

(And I would add that backup and recovery of Postgres seems immensely easier that what I've experienced with Oracle. The command line tools are outstanding, from what I've seen so far. And as usual, they a much more "Unix-like", for lack of a better term, than what Oracle provides. That is a huge plus, in my opinion.)

I'd highly recommend this book. Its concise coverage of the backup and recovery of Postgres will have you up and running in no time. And who has time to waste when it comes to developing proficiency in anything data related these days.