PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It has strong support from the community and is being actively developed with a new release every year. PostgreSQL supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. Also it provides NoSQL capabilities, and very rich data types and extensions. All that makes PostgreSQL a very attractive solution in various kinds of software systems. The book starts with the introduction of relational databases with PostegreSQL. It then moves on to covering data definition language (DDL) with emphasis on PostgreSQL and common DDL commands supported by ANSI SQL. You will then learn the data manipulation language (DML), and advanced topics like locking and multi version concurrency control (MVCC). This will give you a very robust background to tune and troubleshoot your application. The book then covers the implementation of data models in the database such as creating tables, setting up integrity constraints, building indexes, defining views and other schema objects. Next, it will give you an overview about the NoSQL capabilities of PostgreSQL along with Hstore, XML, Json and arrays. Finally by the end of the book, you'll learn to use the JDBC driver and manipulate data objects in the Hibernate framework.