About the Authors

Salahaldin Juba has over 10 years of experience in industry and academia, with a focus on database development for large-scale and enterprise applications. He holds a master's degree of science in environmental management and a bachelor's degree of engineering in computer systems.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my colleagues Achim Vannahme and Andrey Volkov for making this work possible. Also, I would like to thank all those who provided support, especially the Packt publishing team, especially the persons whom I interacted with—Vijin Boricha, Greg Wild, and Parita Khedekar—for their great help with proofreading, design, comments, and remarks.

I would also like to thank my mother, Wedad; my wife, Rana; and the rest of my family, who supported me despite all of the time that I had to devote to this book over them.

Achim Vannahme works as a senior software developer at a mobile messaging operator, where he focuses on software quality and test automation. He holds a degree in computer science and has over 10 years of experience in using Java and PostgreSQL in distributed and high-performance applications.

Andrey Volkov pursued his education in information systems in the banking sector. He started his career as a financial analyst in a commercial bank. Here, Andrey worked with a database as a data source for his analysis and soon realized that querying the database directly is much more efficient for ad hoc analyses than using any visual report-generating software. He joined the data warehouse team, and after a while, he led the team by taking up the position of a data warehouse architect. Andrey worked mainly with Oracle databases to develop logical and physical models of finance and accounting data, created them in a database, implemented procedures to load and process data, and performed analytical tasks. He was also responsible for teaching users how to use data warehouse and BI tools, and SQL training was a part of his job as well.

After many years of being greatly interested in the aspects of his job that were related to IT rather than accounting or banking, Andrey changed fields. Currently, he works as a database developer in a telecommunication company. Here, Andrey works mainly with PostgreSQL databases and is responsible for data modeling, implementing data structures in databases, developing stored procedures, integrating databases with other software components, and developing a data warehouse.

Having worked with both Oracle and PostgreSQL—the former is a leading commercial and the latter is one of the most advanced open source RDBMSes—he is able to compare them and recognize and evaluate the key advantages of both. Andrey's extensive experience, therefore, made him able and willing to work on this book.