Introduction to PostgreSQL
Database Engines
Django comes with a SQLite database which is great for testing and debugging at the beginning of a project.
However, it is not very suitable for production.
Django also support these database engines:
- PostgreSQL
- MariaDB
- MySQL
- Oracle
We will take a closer look at the PostgreSQL database engine.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL database is an open source relational database, which should cover most demands you have when creating a database for a Django project.
It has a good reputation, it is reliable, and it perform well under most circumstances.
We will add a PostgreSQL database to our Django project.
To be able to use PostgreSQL in Django we have to install a package called psycopg2.
Install psycopg2
Type this command in the command line to install the package. Make sure you are still inn the virtual environment:
pip install psycopg2-binary
The result should be something like this:
Collecting psycopg2-binary
Downloading psycopg2_binary-2.9.10-cp313-cp313-win_amd64.whl.metadata (4.8 kB)
Downloading psycopg2_binary-2.9.10-cp313-cp313-win_amd64.whl (2.6 MB)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 2.6/2.6 MB 50.0 MB/s eta 0:00:00
Installing collected packages: psycopg2-binary
Successfully installed psycopg2-binary-2.9.10
[notice] A new release of pip is available: 24.3.1 -> 25.0.1
[notice] To update, run: python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip
The psycopg2 package is a driver that is necessary for PostgreSQL to work in Python.
We also need a server where we can host the database.
In this tutorial we have chosen the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, you will learn more about that in the next chapter.
