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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for PostgreSQL
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- Last updated: Sat Feb 28 10:04:28 EST 1998
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+ Last updated: Wed Apr 15 12:47:01 EDT 1998
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Current maintainer: Bruce Momjian (maillist@candle.pha.pa.us)
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@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ Questions answered:
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1.12) What tools are available for hooking PostgreSQL to Web pages?
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1.13) Does PostgreSQL have a graphical user interface? A report
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generator? A embedded query language interface?
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- 1.14) What is a good book to learn SQL?
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+ 1.14) How can I learn SQL?
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1.15) What languages are available to communicate with PostgreSQL?
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2) Installation/Configuration questions
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2.10) All my servers crash under concurrent table access. Why?
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2.11) How do I tune the database engine for better performance?
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2.12) What debugging features are available in PostgreSQL?
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- 2.13) How do I enable more than 32 concurrent backends?
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+ 2.13) How do I enable more than 32 concurrent backends? 2.14) What
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+ non-unix ports are available?
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3) Operational questions
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@@ -243,8 +244,7 @@ Section 1: General Questions
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1.6) Latest release of PostgreSQL
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- The latest release of PostgreSQL is version 6.3, which was released on
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- March 1st, 1998.
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+ The latest release of PostgreSQL is version 6.3.2.
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We plan to have major releases every three months.
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1.8) What documentation is available for PostgreSQL?
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A user manual, manual pages, and some small test examples are included
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- in the distribution. The sql and built-in manual pages are
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- particularly important.
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+ in the distribution. The pgintro, sql, and pgbuiltin manual pages are
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+ particularly important. pgintro contains a list of all available
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+ manual pages.
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+ psql has some nice \d commands to show information about types,
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+ operators, functions, aggregates, etc.
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The www page contains pointers to an implementation guide and five
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papers written about Postgres design concepts and features.
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1.9) What version of SQL does PostgreSQL use?
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- PostgreSQL supports a subset of SQL-92. It has most of the important
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- constructs but lacks some of the functionality. The most visible
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- differences are:
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- * no HAVING clause under a GROUP BY
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- On the other hand, you get to create user-defined types, functions,
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- inheritance etc.
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+ PostgreSQL supports a subset of SQL-92.
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1.10) Does PostgreSQL work with databases from earlier versions of
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PostgreSQL?
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Those ugrading from versions earlier than 1.09 must upgrade to 1.09
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first without a dump/reload, then dump the data from 1.09, and then
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- load it into 6.2.1 or 6.3 beta .
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+ load it into 6.2.1 or 6.3.
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1.11) Are there ODBC drivers for PostgreSQL?
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* majordomo@listserv.direct.net
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OpenLink ODBC is very popular. You can get it from
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- http://www.openlinksw.com/postgres.html. It works with our standard
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- ODBC client software so you'll have PostgreSQL ODBC available on every
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- client platform we support (Win, Mac, Unix, VMS).
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+ http://www.openlinksw.com. It works with our standard ODBC client
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+ software so you'll have PostgreSQL ODBC available on every client
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+ platform we support (Win, Mac, Unix, VMS).
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We will probably be selling this product to people who need
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commercial-quality support, but a freeware version will always be
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We also have ecpg, which is an embedded SQL query language interface
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for C. This is also included.
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- 1.14) What is a good book to learn SQL?
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+ 1.14) How can I learn SQL?
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+ There is a nice tutorial at http://w3.one.net/~jhoffman/sqltut.htm
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Many of our users like The Practical SQL Handbook, Bowman et al,
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Addison Wesley.
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@@ -426,7 +425,7 @@ Section 2: Installation Questions
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2.11) How do I tune the database engine for better performance?
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- There are two things that can be done. You can disable fsync() by
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+ There are several things that can be done. You can disable fsync() by
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starting the postmaster with a '-o -F' option. This will prevent
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fsync()'s from flushing to disk after every transaction.
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of memory used by each backend process for temporary sorts. Each
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buffer is 1K and the defualt is 512 buffers.
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+ You can also use the CLUSTER command to group data in base tables to
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+ match an index. See the cluster(l) manual page for more details.
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2.12) What debugging features are available in PostgreSQL?
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PostgreSQL has several features that report status information that
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Edit include/storage/sinvaladt.h, and change the value of
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MaxBackendId. In the future, we plan to make this a configurable
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prameter.
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+ 2.13) What non-unix ports are available?
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+ It is possible to compile the libpq C library, psql, and other
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+ interfaces and binaries to run on MS Windows platforms. In this case,
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+ the client is running on MS Windows, and communicates via TCP/IP to a
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+ server running on one of our supported Unix platforms.
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+ People have attempted to port our PostgreSQL database server to
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+ Windows NT using the Cygnus Unix/NT porting library, but no one has
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+ succeeded yet.
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_________________________________________________________________
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Section 3: PostgreSQL Features
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3.10) How do I do regular expression searches? case-insensitive regexp
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searching?
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- See the pgbuiltin manual page. Search for regular expression .
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+ See psql's \do command .
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3.11) I experienced a server crash during a vacuum. How do I remove the lock
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file?
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The default configuration allows only unix domain socket connections
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from the local machine. To enable TCP/IP connections, use the
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postmaster -i option You need to add a host entry to the file
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- pgsql/data/pg_hba. See the hba_conf manual page.
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+ pgsql/data/pg_hba. See the pg_hba.conf manual page.
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3.18) How do I find out what indexes or operations are defined in the
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database?
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