Re: REALLY stupid question

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Rebecca Jones <rmj0nes(at)yahoo(dot)com> wrote:
> Apologies to everyone for contributing an extremely uninteresting and
> ultra-novice-level question to the community. In fact, if the following
> question suggests a particular help or research source that can be
> recommended to me, I would be very grateful to be made aware of it (I have
> already combed through the online document "PostgreSQL 8.3.4 Documentation"
> to try and find the answer myself - I think my question is too elemental.)
>
> Now that I've installed version 8.3.4 on my WinXP HP laptop, how do I
> interface with the RDBMS? I know how to start and stop the server, even
> without really knowing what I'm doing thereby. But when I activate the SQL
> command window I'm faced with having to supply several parameters that I
> don't recall setting and haven't a clue why I'd need to set them, i.e.
> "server", "port", etc. I can live without a hand-holding interface like
> Access provides, but I need a little middle ground here - what's the
> application I should be using to create, load, etc. DBs?

Others have pointed to possible options in terms of "friendly,
quasi-graphical apps" to use in lieu of the command line interface,
which is well and good.

You will still need to supply those same parameters.

It's worth noting that all sorts of databases require similar sorts of
parameters to connect to the database. Here's a link to the
"diversity" of how this works with a lot of databases:
http://www.connectionstrings.com/

When you are connecting to a PostgreSQL database, the following
parameters are frequently ones that need to be set:

- host - what is the name of the database server. Defaults to
localhost (e.g. - the computer you're on)
- hostaddr - what is the numeric IP address (e.g. - like 172.28.40.9);
this is an alternative to host
- port - The PostgreSQL database server listens at a particular port,
by default, port 5432
- dbname - you may have multiple databases set up on a particular
server; you need to specify which one to connect to
- user - this identifies the database user. When the DB is initially
installed, there is normally a single "superuser" set up; you may want
to set a less-super user for less-privileged use. Usually that user
is the same name as the user on your system that "owns" the database
installation. That might be the name you login to your computer as.
- password - password for that user

There are some other *possible* parameters, but they're not usually needed.

For authoritative info on the parameters, see:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/libpq-connect.html

When connecting to the database in different ways, the way those
parameters get passed in may differ. A Java application that uses
JDBC will collect them together somewhat differently from an
application using ODBC which is different from applications using
"libpq". But the set of parameters will be much the same.

You may want to start out by trying out pgadmin, as others have
suggested; that will provide menu-guided ways for you to do the sorts
of things you ask about (e.g. - creating and setting up databases).
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