Installing Postgres

To aid with some development work that I am doing at the moment I've got to install PostgreSQL on my notebook - I thought that I should share this journey with the wider world and maybe help a couple of others along the way. My laptop is running a fresh Ubuntu 8.04 install, and for convenience I'm going to be using the distributions installer to install the database.

First things first, lets install the basic packages:

sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-client postgresql-doc pgadmin3

This will install the database server, command line client, and some documentation (you will need to enter your password when prompted). It will also install the pgadmin3 gui which is a great program for managing your database.

Well first things first, lets set up a new user account so that we can connect in using our nice shiny gui - we start by connecting to the database:

sudo -u postgres psql

Now we can create a new user - in this example with a username foo and a password of bar. Obviously you should change these values to something more appropriate for you:

CREATE USER foo WITH PASSWORD bar;

You should now be able to connect using pgadmin3 - find this program on your system menu and fire it up. Once it is up and running there is a plug icon on the top left which lets you add a new server (you can also go to the file menu and select add server). You will then be prompted for some details.

Name is just that, a name by which you would like the program to call your connection. Host should be filled out with the word 'localhost', without the quotes. You can then enter the username and password that you used above, before clicking ok.

The servers details should then be saved, and a new connection opened for you. All that's left to do is to have a play with all the new options!

Chris

Welcome!

Welcome to the new Pure Innovation blog! Over the next few days we're going to start writing about some of the latest items and technology we're working on. In particular I will be writing about transitioning from the MySQL database over to the PostgreSQL database - something that we have been looking at for a number of years. Also look out for some posts on the development of our new web server platform and some of the cool features that we're building into that, as well as some work we are doing with perl, PHP and the symfony framework.