Postgres. Understanding what it is.

Introduction

• This series is going to be on PostgreSQL, also know as postgres. We will be starting simple by trying to understand what postgres is and in future posts we will be diving into tutorial based examples of how to persist data with postgres.HERE is a link to the tutorial that I will be following and elaborating on. With that being said lets jump into it.

What is Postgres?

• Well the documentation states, "PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) developed at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department". I don't know about you but that has a lot of scary technical words and I have no idea what they mean. So lets start small and try to understand what these words mean.

• database : a database is simply an abstract term for a collection of structured information(data). A database is usually controlled by a database management system.

• database management system : this is the DBMS in ORDBMS and a DBMS acts as an interface between us and the database. the DBMS dictates how we talk to and structure our database. An example of a DBMS is Postgres.

• object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) : this is a little complex to define. However, so far we know what a database is and what a database management system is. So what is a object-relational database management system? The two key words we have to look at are, object and relational, they tell us that it is a combination of a object oriented database management system and a relational database system.

object-oriented database management system (OODBMS) : as the name might suggest this is a management system that is based on object oriented programming. This means that we access and model the data according to object oriented techniques.

relational database management system (RDBMS) : this is a database that is based on the relational model where related data is stored in tables.

So what does all of this mean?

• Well if you look at the names of all the database management systems, you will see they tell us what we want to know. Object-oriented means it is based on the object oriented paradigm. Relational means it is based on the relational model. Finally we come to the question, what is a object-relational database management system? For our answer we look to the name, object-relational, that must mean it is a combination of both? You are correct! The object-relational model for database management systems seeks to find a nice middle ground between object-oriented and relational. The data is still stored in tables but we are able to use objects to organize and map the data. Hopefully we both now have a more solid understanding of what a object-relational database management system is.

What is Postgres?

• It is a database management system that uses a combination of object-oriented and relational techniques to access and store data.

Conclusion

• Thank you for taking the time out of you day to read this blog post of mine. If you have any questions or concerns please comment below or reach out to me on Twitter.
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