[cfolgar]

Since we're discussing databases...is there any "golden standard" learning resource/introduction to PostegreSQL? As a college student, I do not have much experience with them yet but I am aware of how important it would be to be comfortable with them in your day to development. Something tells me that my usual approach of diving in and tinkering by building out an idea wouldn't serve me as well for db's; it just seems to me that there's some fundamental database concepts that I would be missing if I went down that path.

Any advice as to where to start a structured approach to learning about databases would be highly appreciated :)

[wowmsi]

I would recommend "Architecture of a Database System" by Joe Hellerstein, Micheal Stonebraker, and James Hamilton [0] as a start if you want formal perspective without getting too much into theory.

[0] http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/fntdb07-architecture.pdf

[jbergens]

As a sidenote, Michael Stonebreaker himself is nowdays building VoltDb which is a memory-db that he thinks is much more evolved than relational systems. I havn't used it but it looks interesting. I did try OrigoDb which is an open source .NET based memory db and it worked great for my needs and the queries are really fast.

[bballard]

(I work at VoltDB)

VoltDB is easy to try. There is a free 30-day trial available on voltdb.com, and a docker-based demo (http://voltdb.com/voltdb-demo).

[AlisdairO]

Apologies for the self-plug, but you might find http://pgexercises.com/ useful for the SQL side of learning Postgres. In terms of rest of the concepts, the Postgres documentation is actually really rather good!