I’m working with a team building a data warehouse using Pivotal’s GreenPlum MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) database which is based on PostgreSQL. Although, all the data modeling basics transition easily from RDBMS to RDBMS there’s a bit of a learning curve switching tools and syntax. Listed below are some of the items I’ve noted during the transition.

Table and Column Names

In a typical SQL Server installation table and column names are case insensitive. In Postgres and GreenPlum table and column names are converted to all lower by default (unless they are created with double quotes around them). This means that if you are used to using CamelCase as a naming convention you’ll more than likely want to switch to underscores for readability.

Tools

Goodbye SQL Server Management Studio. Hello pg Admin. You can download pg Admin from pgadmin.org

pgAdmin

Want to comment out a block of code in pgAdmin? Highlight the section of code and then ctrl+K will do the trick. Want to uncomment a block? Highlight and then ctrl+shift+K.

Interested in a specific topic? Leave a comment and I’ll get back to you…