Session: Everything You Wanted to Know About Databases as a Developer but Were Too Afraid to Ask Your DBA
The database forms the backbone of many applications so it’s essential for applications to interact with the database in an optimal way. Unfortunately, database administration doesn’t usually form part of a developer’s training so you may have a wealth of experience and talent in designing and developing applications, yet have little or no database knowledge. There’s probably a database expert in your organisation in the form of a DBA, but this expert is probably too grumpy busy to take the time to explain to you how databases work. This workshop aims to provide you with the minimum that you, as a developer, need to know about databases in general, and about PostgreSQL in particular. You will come away with a “database cheat sheet” of the different terminology and concepts that will make you sound like an instant database expert. You’ll learn to explain with confidence the difference between a database, a database cluster and an instance, how database objects can be partitioned and why you might want to do that, how schemas and tablespaces can be used to group database objects, the different constraints that can be used to enforce the integrity of your data, the difference between a view and a materialized view and much more.
