PostgreSQL Clients

Postgres can be connected from a programming language, a CLI tool or a GUI. Postgres follows the Client Server architecture where the server listens to requests from the client and returns a response.

In the end, the clients are just wrappers over SQL commands that get executed on the server and return a response.

Some of the popular client applications for PostgreSQL include

• pg_dump - Extracting database into a file
• pg_restore - Restoring a database from a file
• create_db - Create a new PostgreSQL database
• create_user - Create a new PostgreSQL user account
• psql - Interactive terminal

The full list of client applications is available here.

We will use psql for the rest of the tutorial. Since it's an interactive terminal, we can execute commands, SQL statements and control the database as a whole.