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🐘 Learn how to use PostgreSQL and Structured Query Language (SQL) to store and query your relational data. 🔍
Learn to use Postgres
and Structured Query Language (SQL)
to securely store
and reliably query your data.
Helping people store, retrieve and derive insights from data
is the essence of all software applications.
Like it or not, Relational Databases store
most of the world's structured data
and Structured Query Language (SQL)
is by far the most frequent way of retrieving the data.
According to the most recent surveys/statistics,
SQL still dominates the world of databases.
PostgreSQL specifically is the most popular:
survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-databases
https://db-engines.com/en/ranking
Note: you should never adopt a technology based on it's current popularity, also be ware of "argumentum ad populum" ("it's popular therefore you should use it"). Always pick the appropriate tool for the job based on the requirements, constraints and/or availability (both of "skill" on your existing team or in the wider community). We include these stats to explain that relational databases are still the most widely used by far and so learning
SQLskills is a very wise investment both as an individual and for your team or organisation.
Getting started with `PostgreSQL`` is easy,
(just follow the steps in this guide and try out the example queries!)
When you are ready to deploy your app, you are in safe hands,
PostgreSQL runs everywhere:
Everyone building any application that stores data should learn SQL.
SQL is ubiquitous in every field/industry and the sooner you learn/master it,
the higher your life-time return on time investment.
Learning how to use a relational database is a foundational skill for all of computer science and application development.
Being proficient in SQL will open the door to Data Science with
SQL-on-Hadoop
Apache Spark,
Google BigQuery,
Oracle
and Teradata.
In short, get really good at SQL! It's very useful.
This tutorial covers 5 areas:
Once you have covered these areas, you will know if PostgreSQL is "right" for your needs, or if you need to keep looking for a different way to store data.
Let's dive in!
PostgreSQL (often shortened to simply "Postgres") is an advanced Relational DataBase Management System ("RDBMS"), that lets you efficiently and securely store any type of data. We will explain "Relational Database" in the context of our example below, so don't worry if it sounds like a buzzword soup.
Postgres has an emphasis on standards compliance and extensibility which means there are many plugins you can use to enhance it like PostGIS for mapping applications and entire projects built on top of it like TimescaleDB (a time-series database perfect for analytics) and AgensGraph (a graph database, great for modelling networks e.g a "social graph").
Structured Query Language (SQL)
is the preferred means of interacting with data at any scale.
The only reason MySQL is still more widely used than Postgres can be summarised in one word: WordPress. WordPress has a firm grip on the CMS-based website market and it shows no sign of slowing down. If your goal is to build CMS-based websites, or the company you already work for uses WordPress, you should go for it! If you prefer a more general introduction to SQL, follow this tutorial! The knowledge you will gain by learning Postgres is 95%+ "transferable" to other SQL databases so don't worry about the differences between MySQL and Postgres for now. If you're curious, read: https://hackr.io/blog/postgresql-vs-mysql
Before you get started with using PostgreSQL, you'll have to install it. Follow these steps to get started:
There are a couple of ways to install PostgreSQL. One of the easier ways to
get started is with Postgres.app. Navigate to https://postgresapp.com/ and then
click "Download":
Once it's finished downloading, double click on the file to unzip then move
the PostgreSQL elephant icon into your applications folder. Double click the
icon to launch the application.
You should now see a new window launched with a list of servers to the left side of the window
(if it's a fresh install, you should see one named PostgreSQL XX).
If it shows anything else or an error props up, make sure you don't have any other instances of Postgres on your computer and reinstall.
To fully reinstall follow these steps to delete data directories and preferences.
Click on the button 'Initialize' (or 'Start' if you had already installed previously).
Run sudo mkdir -p /etc/paths.d && echo /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/latest/bin | sudo tee /etc/paths.d/postgresapp
(found here) to use psql in the terminal.
Close and open the terminal.
Postgres.app will by default create a role and database that matches your current macOS username. You can connect straight away by running psql.
You should then see something in your terminal that looks like this (with your macOS username in front of the prompt rather than 'postgres'):
Digital Ocean have got a great article on getting started with postgres. A quick summary is below.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib
By default the only role created is the default 'postgres', so PostgreSQL will only respond to connections from an Ubuntu user called 'postgres'. We need to pretend to be that user and create a role matching our actual Ubuntu username:
sudo -u postgres createuser --interactive
This command means 'run the command createuser --interactive as the user called "postgres"'.
When asked for the name of the role enter your Ubuntu username. If you're not sure, open a new Terminal tab and run whoami.
When asked if you want to make the role a superuser, type 'y'.
We now need to create the database matching the role name, as PostgreSQL expects this. Run:
sudo -u postgres createdb [your user name]
You can now connect to PostgreSQL by running psql.
To start PostgreSQL, type this command into the terminal:
psql
Next type this command into the PostgreSQL interface:
CREATE DATABASE test;
NOTE: Don't forget the semi-colon. If you do, useful error messages won't
show up.
To check that our database has been created, type \l into the psql prompt.
You should see something like this in your terminal:
If you closed the PostgreSQL server, start it again with:
psql
To create a new user, type the following into the psql prompt:
CREATE USER testuser;
Check that your user has been created. Type \du into the prompt. You should
see something like this:
Users can be given certain permissions to access any given database you have
created.
Next we need to give our user permissions to access the test database we
created above. Enter the following command into the psql prompt:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE test TO testuser;
If you've installed Postgres App as in the example above, you can easily extend it to include PostGIS. Follow these steps to begin using PostGIS:
Ensure that you're logged in as a user OTHER THAN postgres. Follow the
steps above to enable your default user to be able to access the psql prompt.
(installation step 7)
Type the following into the psql prompt to add the extension:
CREATE EXTENSION postgis;
After you've extended PostgreSQL with PostGIS you can begin to use it. Type
the following command into the psql command line:
SELECT ST_Distance(gg1, gg2) As spheroid_dist FROM (SELECT ST_GeogFromText('SRID=4326;POINT(-72.1235 42.3521)') As gg1, ST_GeogFromText('SRID=4326;POINT(-72.1235 43.1111)') As gg2 ) As foo ;
This should return spheroid_dist along with a value in meters. The
example above returns: 84315.42034614 which is rougly 84.3km between the two
points.
Once you are serving the database from your computer
To change db
\connect database_name;
To see the tables in the database
\d;
To select (and show in terminal) all tables
SELECT * FROM table_name
To make a table
CREATE TABLE table_name (col_name1, col_name2)
To add a row
INSERT INTO table_name ( col_name ) VALUES ( col_value)
col_name only require if only some of the cols are being filled out
To edit a column to a table
ALTER TABLE table_name ALTER COLUMN column_name SET DEFAULT expression
To add a column to a table
ALTER TABLE table_name ADD COLUMN column_name data_type
To find the number of instances where the word “Day” is present in the title of a table
SELECT count(title) FROM table_name WHERE title LIKE '%Day%’;
To delete a row in a table
DELETE FROM table_name WHERE column_name = ‘hello';
Postgresql follows the SQL convention of calling relations TABLES, attributes COLUMNs and tuples ROWS
Transaction All or nothing, if something fails the other commands are rolled back like nothing happened
Reference When a table is being created you can reference a column in another table to make sure any value which is added to that column exists in the referenced table.
CREATE TABLE cities ( name text NOT NULL, postal_code varchar(9) CHECK (postal_code <> ''), country_code char(2) REFERENCES countries, PRIMARY KEY (country_code, postal_code) );
<> means not equal
Join reads You can join tables together when reading them,
Inner Join Joins together two tables by specifying a column in each to join them by i.e.
SELECT cities.*, country_name FROM cities INNER JOIN countries ON cities.country_code = countries.country_code;
This will select all of the columns in both the countries
and cities tables the data, the rows are matched up by country_code.
Grouping You can put rows into groups where the group is defined by a shared value in a particular column.
SELECT venue_id, count(*) FROM events GROUP BY venue_id;
This will group the rows together by the venue_id, count is then performed on each of the groups.