Your mission, if you chose to accept it, was to share a single tip/hint/fact/something that you wish you’d known about PostgreSQL when you were just getting started learning it. Well, we’ve got several people who have put together some excellent posts. Let’s go over ’em all, in no particular order.
First up, Lætitia Avrot has a post all about the PostgreSQL documentation and it is well worth the read. I couldn’t agree more with all her points. Plus, I love, love, LOVE the summary list of pointers to documentation broken down by role. Thanks so much for sharing all this.
I also wrote a post about the docs. Lætitia covers them better.
Next, Andreas Scherbaum has some very cool tips for using psql. My knowledge here is a bit slim. Plus, I’ve been using other tools. This is very useful stuff.
Then we have Mr. Ryan Booz himself, one of the founders of PGSqlPhriday, explicitly breaking the rules and giving several tips instead of just one. Kidding of course. Anyone is free to share as much as they like, encouraged even. Most of the post is about lateral joins, which, yeah, looks like something I need to spend some time on. Several other good tips in there as well.
Steven Vance adds a discussion around the problems caused by character limits with the VARCHAR data type. Happily, I understand this one because it’s similar to how SQL Server, as well as other databases, works. However, if you were just learning, this is the kind of vital information I was hoping we’d see.
The last one I have to offer you is, again, a useful hint from Gabrielle, GorthX, on getting the text of the most recently run query. Me, I’m still copying & pasting stuff, but I’ll be trying this out to get better.
That’s all the ones I could find. Thank you everyone for participating. You really knocked it out of the park. These are great tips and I sure hope they prove useful to people learning PostgreSQL.