January 2002
Intermediate to advanced
640 pages
16h 39m
English
Content preview from Practical PostgreSQLBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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SQL Statements
Conceptual information on relational databases and tables is of course entirely moot if you don’t have any idea of how to directly interact with your data. From a general perspective, SQL consists entirely of structured statements, with which all data in the database is added, modified, and removed. These statements form the basis for your communication with the PostgreSQL server.
The following sections dissect the anatomy of a SQL statement into its structural pieces, explaining the significance of each, and their relation to one another. The standard PostgreSQL command-line client, psql, provides output to display example PostgreSQL statements.
Our SQL examples commonly take place within an example database called booktown, the database for our imaginary bookstore, Book Town. The output from
psql is consistently prefixed with a default prompt style, which looks
like this:
booktown=#
Some simpler examples may use our generic test database, testdb, if not
specific to the Book Town examples. By default, the psql prompt displays
only the name of the connected database and the =# characters indicating
that the system is ready for a new command (though you will see that the =
symbol will change dynamically as psql tracks the status of SQL input). We
display this prompt along with the SQL input and output in order to help familiarize you with
the psql output.
Chapter 4 documents psql in more detail, and it is only mentioned here to explain the source and style of this book’s ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.