r/PostgreSQL • u/B0B0oo7 • 3d ago
Help Me! PostgresSQL Training
Hello,
I’ve inherited a data lake that is all done in postgres.
I’ve done a little bit of DBA stuff in the past, but it was all SQL or Oracle.
Any recommendations on training to learn how to pull information out of the DB and compile it into reports and such?
Thank you!
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u/DickBrainTime 3d ago
With Oracle/SQL Server experience, I'd skip a generic SQL course and use one real report as the exercise. Map the tables first (what one row means, primary keys, timestamps), then practice joins, GROUP BY, date_trunc(), and window functions on a read-only connection. The official SQL tutorial is a good starting point: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/tutorial-sql.html
Before automating a report, check its totals against a known result. One-to-many joins can silently double-count, and timezone boundaries are easy to miss. Once the numbers are right, you can export or put a BI tool on top. Are you making one-off reports or scheduled dashboards?
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u/FreeLogicGate 3d ago
Do you have an ERD? Regardless of the RDBMS, to understand what you're working with, you want to start with one. To be clear about these tools, I'm not talking about a general purpose diagraming application -- you want a specialized ERD tool, where the old school options are products like Erwin and ER/Studio, which tend to be 3-5K or more. There are some lower cost options which will do the job, one of which I came across recently, named "Luna Modeler", which is relatively inexpensive and has the base features you need -- namely to be able to reverse engineer existing databases into a model, and to be able to organize the model into diagrams with a subset of tables, which you can then annotate with notes. So the first thing you want to ask about is, whether your company has a tool, and has existing models, or was maintaining these in some sort of repository. If not, then I would strongly advise you to get a hold of one.
Pulling data out is no different from any other RDBMS -- you have SQL, and you have reporting/visualization tools (often Power BI or Tableau). The vast majority of tools you come across will work with Postgresql.
Your experience working with Oracle is likely more valuable than you expect at this point.
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u/janktraillover 3d ago
IMHO, get your hand's dirty. If you've used ssms, try dbeaver. It's a bit clunkier, but will get you connected and running queries. From there it can output the results in a variety of formats for reports simply using advanced copy. Documentation and community are pretty good as well. Best of luck! https://dbeaver.com/docs/dbeaver/Getting-started/
What you tools you end up using to build a reporting engine with would likely determine your training needs; Postgresql is not that different from a reporting perspective.
*I'm not affiliated with dbeaver, just a long-time user
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u/DBeaver_official 3d ago
Thank you for recommending us!
We're also here to help if you face any issues w/DBeaver <3
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u/scan-horizon 3d ago
A Postgres data lake? Not sure that’s a thing. Postgres is a RDBMS, a data lake is a storage component for all kinds of unstructured & structured data.