Vertabelo Blog

JSON is a data interchange format that is designed to be lightweight and easy to work with. It’s quite popular in web applications, and it can be considerably more flexible than a traditional relational data model. PostgreSQL 9.3 and later versions support JSON, so you can store JSON data and use native Postgres functions to operate on it. This includes decomposing, transforming, or even creating JSON data from regular relational data.

In today’s article, we will take a look at composite primary key support in two top Java ORMs: jOOQ and Hibernate. We’ll look at a couple examples, learn how column configuration looks in Hibernate, and how support is organized in jOOQ.

Logos are powerful. What better way to remind people of a product than an eye-catching, memorable symbol? With that in mind, today we’ll answer the question ‘Why did PostgreSQL choose an elephant for its logo?’

PostgreSQL provides an activity-tracking module called the statistics collector, which tracks table access and other internal events. If your database is experiencing long wait times, you may be able to use this tool and some simple SQL to find and fix the problem.

When you were learning database concepts, data modeling looked pretty easy, didn’t it? You knew all the rules, and modeling seemed like a game: get a challenge, do your best, and eventually solve it. Job well done! Moving up to the next level – and so on.

Geographical applications are everywhere: GPS and sat nav systems, maps, get-a-taxi apps, real estate portals, etc. Behind each of them is a spatial database storing geographical data, and supporting spatial queries. In this article, we will introduce PostGIS, the main open-source spatial database manager.

Storage engines can surprise you. For example, take the CHAR data type. It expects an exact number of characters and by definition stores a fixed amount of information. However, you don’t have to fill all the available CHAR space – a shorter value will work. This is so similar to VARCHAR that I decided to explore the differences between these two types.

Some years ago, when PostgreSQL version 8.3 was released, a new extension called tablefunc was introduced. This extension provides a really interesting set of functions. One of them is the crosstab function, which is used for pivot table creation. That’s what we’ll cover in this article.

I’ve been testing a ton of frameworks lately – good and otherwise. One of them, the Java micro framework Spark, really amazed me with its simplicity and rapid development capabilities. In this article, we’ll examine an example of Spark’s usefulness by creating a REST API. So, without further ado, let’s see how to store, retrieve, update and delete some information in a PostgreSQL database using jOOQ ORM over a RESTful API in a simple To-do app.

The art of designing a good database is like swimming. It is relatively easy to start and difficult to master. If you want to learn to design databases, you should for sure have some theoretic background, like knowledge about database normal forms and transaction isolation levels. But you should also practice as much as possible, because the sad truth is that we learn most… by making errors.