EDB PostgreSQL Associate study guide
EDB PostgreSQL Associate · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The EDB PostgreSQL Associate is an early-career certification intended to show that a candidate has a solid working foundation in PostgreSQL - the open-source database that EDB has contributed to since 2006 and builds its commercial products on. It is aimed at database administrators, developers, data engineers and platform engineers who are starting to run Postgres in real environments, and at professionals arriving from another relational platform who need to prove they can transfer their skills. The EDB PostgreSQL Associate study guide has 8 sections and about 2,734 words.
01PostgreSQL Architecture and Installation
PostgreSQL uses a process-per-connection model: the postmaster ( postgres ) listens on port 5432, forks a backend per client, and supervises background workers - checkpointer, background writer, WAL writer, autovacuum launcher, logical replication launcher. Shared memory holds shared buffers and WAL buffers; each backend additionally gets private work mem regions.
336 words, about 2 min02SQL Fundamentals and Data Types
You write SELECT first, but PostgreSQL logically evaluates FROM → WHERE → GROUP BY → HAVING → window functions → SELECT → DISTINCT → ORDER BY → LIMIT/OFFSET . That is why a SELECT alias works in ORDER BY but not in WHERE .
329 words, about 2 min03Database Objects and Schema Design
A schema is a namespace and every object lives in one. search path (default "$user", public ) decides how unqualified names resolve, and unqualified CREATE statements land in the first schema on that path.
330 words, about 2 min04Data Manipulation and Querying
is the upsert; DO NOTHING silently skips conflicts. RETURNING returns generated values in the same statement.
316 words, about 2 min05Backup, Restore, and Recovery
Logical backups ( pg dump , pg dumpall , COPY ) are portable across versions and architectures but slow, and they cannot perform point-in-time recovery. Physical backups copy data files ( pg basebackup , filesystem snapshots) and, combined with archived WAL, deliver full PITR.
330 words, about 2 min06Security and Access Control
PostgreSQL has one concept: the role . LOGIN is a user; without LOGIN it is a group.
369 words, about 2 min07Performance Monitoring and Tuning
EXPLAIN shows the estimated plan with costs in arbitrary units ( seq page cost = 1 ); EXPLAIN ANALYZE executes the statement and adds actual rows and timing. Add BUFFERS to see shared hits versus reads.
370 words, about 2 min08Replication and High Availability
A standby continuously replays WAL from a primary. The primary needs wal level=replica (or logical ), max wal senders , and a pg hba.conf entry permitting the replication connection; the standby needs a standby.signal file and primary conninfo .
354 words, about 2 min