Latest posts from Kat Batuigas

This post is the second in a two-part series -- read the first here: Going Back to Basics with PostgreSQL Data Types.

In my last post, I shared some interesting (and at times surprising) things that I learned while digging into data types in PostgreSQL. Data types like numeric, integer, date, and char/varchar exist in every other relational database system since the need to work with such data is pretty much a given. The implementation may vary somewhat between systems, but generally there are standard ways you’ll want to process and analyze these types of data (e.g. perform mathematical calculations, find the length of a character string, cast from one type to another, etc).

In Postgres, we have a few more data types that may not be as well known even for experienced developers. Let’s take a quick look at arrays, enum, and range types.

Array type

When I first started to learn how to code, I was introduced to the concept of data types: a 6 is not the same as "6", because the former is numeric (typically an integer type, with some variations in terminology based on the language) and the latter a string; "true" is not necessarily the same as true, because true can be a Boolean value in some languages.

Underneath the code, these pieces of data are really just a combination of ones and zeros, but declaring their types allows them to play a particular role. A value’s data type tells the computer when an expression like 6+6 should return a 12, or 66! That said, it wasn’t until I started learning a little bit more about enterprise databases

In our last blog post about pg_featureserv, we showed how it can publish spatial datasets and access them via simple web requests. In this post, we’re going to discuss how publishing PostgreSQL