What is PostgreSQL? - PostgreSQL Tutorial

- [Speaker] Let's kick things off with a brief discussion about what PostgreSQL is and why it might be a fantastic choice for meeting your data platform requirements. PostgreSQL or sometimes simply Postgres is a robust relational database management system or RDBMS. According to the folks at db-engines.com, it ranks as the fourth most popular database platform in the world behind industry powerhouses, Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft's SQL Server. But unlike those three platforms Postgres has seen a steady increase in popularity over the past decade. This trend in popularity can be attributed to a number of factors. First, PostgreSQL is an open source project which makes it free for any organization of any size to pick up and apply to their needs. Compare that with some of the other popular platforms that can cost thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy across an organization and you'll see why Postgres is a good choice from a simple financial perspective. Second, Postgres has been in active development for over 35 years and has gained a reputation for being a reliable, robust, and secure data platform. This is in large part due to its nature as an open source project where people from all over the world collaborate to examine source code, help identify and fix bugs, and develop new features. Finally, as more large businesses push Postgres to its limits, it gives smaller users more confidence in the platform's capabilities, which makes transitioning from a paid commercial database platform more justifiable. After all, if organizations the size of Reddit, Apple and Yahoo trust Postgres to meet their needs then it's definitely up to the task of handling anything that I can throw at it. Now, I mentioned that Postgres was a relational database management system so let's unpack exactly what that means. An RDBMS creates a protective wrapper around your data. It gives your data a place to live, controls how it gets entered, and under what circumstances it can be viewed, modified, or deleted. The RDBMS also secures your data and ensures that only people in applications that have expressed permission to view and change the data have the ability to do so and keeps everyone else locked out. Finally, an RDBMS manages the performance of the system which helps you enter data and retrieve information in the most efficient ways possible. To do all of this, PostgreSQL uses a server/client model. The Postgres server handles the storage, security and maintenance of your data by storing it in a container called a database. Each Postgres server can hold many different databases. A client application is then connected to the server so that end users can input data, modify that data and then retrieve that data back out again. The beauty of this arrangement is that the server can exist on a centralized computer that provides a single point of contact for all of the different users in an organization. Then each user uses their own desktop computer, mobile device or web app, running a client application to access that shared resource pool. In this way, everyone across the organization is getting the same information, updating the same data tables and viewing the same detailed reports. So in order to learn about the PostgreSQL platform, we really need to dive into two components; how the database server operates and how to use an interface client. In this course we'll be using a client called pgAdmin to log into the Postgres server and tell it what we want to do. In order to perform all of the tasks that a PostgreSQL server needs to do to manage your data, you'll need to become familiar with the SQL programming language. SQL stands for structured query language and it's a common language used by data science professionals in practically every database application in use today. This makes the ability to read and write SQL Commands a very transferable skill that's highly sought after in the workplace. Unlike many traditional programming languages SQL uses human readable syntax that's straightforward and flexible. So don't let the idea of learning a programming language scare you away. I'll introduce you to the basics in this course and you'll be writing your own SQL commands in no time. But if writing code is also not your thing, don't worry. The pgAdmin Graphical Interface client that we're going to use will give us lots of graphical tools that'll make executing commands a lot easier. So that's the basics of what PostgreSQL does and how it can be used to help protect and store your valuable data.