Some docs about postgres

I had to do a bit of research into postgres a while ago to help a customer migrate from postgres to MaxDB. I must admit that postgres is developing well. It is an entirely different beast than MySQL, and compliments it well.

I think that the MySQL and pg developers would do well to make amends and share some of their war stories. I think people involved in both projects have much to learn from one another.

I learned while on the #postgres channel on the Freenode irc network about a few good tools that come with the Debian packages of postgres.

Debian package names:
postgresql - object-relational SQL database management system (transitional)
postgresql-client - front-end programs for PostgreSQL (transitional package)
postgresql-common - manager for PostgreSQL database clusters
postgresql-contrib - additional facilities for PostgreSQL (transitional package)

and a few more. To find the list, on a debian system, run the following:

$ apt-cache search postgres | grep postgres | less

To install it, do the following. Note that $package represents the package name, or the string to the left of the first " - ". If you do not have sudo correctly installed on your machine, you may instead change user to root before running the below. But instead, you should install sudo. Now.

$ sudo apt-get install postgresql

The postgresql package is much like the mysql-common package. It installs all of the most common features of the database, including both the server and the client pacakges.

Here is how I got the list:

ls /var/cache/apt/archives/postgresql-client*i386*.deb | \
tail -1 | \
dpkg -c /usr/archives/packages/postgresql-client*i386*.deb | \
grep bin | \
perl -e ' \
  my @binList;
  while(){
    my $binName;
    ($binName = $_) =~ s:^.*bin/(.*)$:$1:;
    chomp $binName;
    push(@binList, $binName) if $binName;
  }

  print(join(", ",
    map {
    qq(<a href="http://www.die.net/search/search.cgi?words=$_&sort=score&restrict=">$_</a>)
    } @binList), "\n")
'

And here is what I received:
clusterdb, pg_dumpall, pg_dump, pg_dumplo, createdb, createlang, createuser, dropdb, droplang, dropuser, pg_restore, psql, vacuumdb, vacuumlo, pg_id

Go do your homework.