Connecting to the PostgreSQL server

How do we access PostgreSQL?

Connecting to the database is the first experience of PostgreSQL for most people, so we want to make it a good one. Let's do it now, and fix any problems we have along the way. Remember that a connection needs to be made secure, so there may be some hoops for us to jump through to ensure that the data we wish to access is secure.

Before we can execute commands against the database, we need to connect to the database server to give us a session.

Sessions are designed to be long-lived, so you connect once, perform many requests, and eventually disconnect. There is a small overhead during the connection. It may become noticeable if you connect and disconnect repeatedly, so you may wish to investigate the use of connection pools. Connection pools allow pre-connected sessions to be quickly served to you when you wish to reconnect.

Getting ready

First, cache your database. If you don...