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by filereaper 3744 days ago
Short of doing a deep dive into Postgresql, do any universities use Postgresql as a basis for their DB implementation courses? I wanted to dive into Postgres and was hoping for some training wheels. Thanks.
6 comments

PG is, IMHO, probably one of the best code bases for this.

I'm far and away not a database hacker, but have read parts of the code at various times to better understand what I was seeing. The codebase is incredibly well written and organized, and the documentation (both developer and user) is top-notch.

The only problem I can think of with using it in a course would be choosing what to focus on with only a semester. Add in the long revision history and I think there are also multiple theses in there on the sociology of open source.

There is a "Hacking PostgreSQL" course[1], which tries to explain PostgreSQL internals and architecture, but it is available in Russian only[2]

[1] http://postgrespro.ru/education/courses/hacking [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLaFqU3KCWw6Jfb8IBNk3hZ07...

CS186 at Berkeley was entirely in the guts of PostgreSQL. But then, I suppose that's not too surprising given the history.

Personally, I found it a delight to work with, and that has translated into a great respect for the product itself. It is no great surprise that the pace of development stays strong and that engineers gravitate toward it; it's set up for exactly that.

My university does, though unfortunately we don't have any public course information.
Dive in the documentation + mailing list + postgresql planet.