A Curious Moon

Book excerpt: Starting an application is simple enough, whether you use migrations, a model-synchronizer or good old-fashioned hand-rolled SQL. A year from now, however, when your app has grown and you're trying to measure what's happened... the story can quickly change when data is overwhelming you and you need to make sense of what's been accumulating. Learning how PostgreSQL works is just one aspect of working with data. PostgreSQL is there to enable, enhance and extend what you do as a developer/DBA. And just like any tool in your toolbox, it can help you create crap, slice off some fingers, or help you be the superstar that you are.That's the perspective of A Curious Moon - data is the truth, data is your friend, data is your business. The tools you use (namely PostgreSQL) are simply there to safeguard your treasure and help you understand what it's telling you.But what does it mean to be "data-minded"? How do you even get started? These are good questions and ones I struggled with when outlining this book. I quickly realized that the only way you could truly understand the power and necessity of solid databsae design was to live the life of a new DBA... thrown into the fire like we all were at some point...Meet Dee Yan, our fictional intern at Red:4 Aerospace. She's just been handed the keys to a massive set of data, straight from Saturn, and she has to load it up, evaluate it and then analyze it for a critical project. She knows that PostgreSQL exists... but that's about it.Much more than a tutorial, this book has a narrative element to it a bit like The Martian, where you get to know Dee and the problems she faces as a new developer/DBA... and how she solves them.The truth is in the data...