Skip to Content
Practical PostgreSQL
book

Practical PostgreSQL

by Joshua D. Drake, John C. Worsley
January 2002
Intermediate to advanced
640 pages
16h 39m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Practical PostgreSQL

Chapter 5. Operators and Functions

This chapter expands on the operators and functions available to PostgreSQL. These character symbols and identifiers allow you to flexibly modify and compare results within SQL statements. The results of these operations can be used in a variety of ways, from updating existing row data, to constraining query results to only rows matching particular conditions.

PostgreSQL supports the usual variety of standard SQL operators and functions as defined by the ANSI/ISO SQL standards, such as mathematical operators, basic text formatting functions, and date and time value extraction. PostgreSQL also comes with a rich set of custom PostgreSQL extensions, such as regular expression comparison operators, and the flexible to_char( ) text conversion function.

Take note that these sections describe the native operators and functions available to PostgreSQL. An excellent feature of PostgreSQL is its extensibility in this area. Once you have a solid understanding of operators and functions, you may be interested in developing your own. These techniques are described in Chapter 7.

Become 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,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI 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.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’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.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'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.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

PostgreSQL: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

PostgreSQL: Up and Running, 2nd Edition

Regina O. Obe, Leo S. Hsu
PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

Dinesh Kumar, Chitij Chauhan

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449309770Errata Page