Sams¿ PHP and MySQL Web Development, by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson, showed that there is a strong demand for books that describe how to use PHP together with a specific open-source database to develop Web applications. While MySQL is very popular, PostgreSQL is widely considered to be the more powerful of the two open-source databases. And PostgreSQL is rapidly gaining market share large organizations are beginning to use PostgreSQL instead of Oracle; the demand for PostgreSQL training and support has increased by some accounts 50% in the last six months; and Web hosting services increasingly offer PostgreSQL along with MySQL. PHP and PostgreSQL Advanced Web Programming focuses on the specific needs of a PostgreSQL developer and will detail how to make use of PostgreSQL¿s unique, advanced features to develop high-availability, fail-safe Web applications with PHP and PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL is an object-relational database server that is widely considered to be the world¿s most advanced open-source database system. It is ANSI SQL-compatible, and it offers powerful features to enable more complex software design than would be possible with relational databases that are not object-oriented. PostgreSQL is extremely modular, it supports a large number of datatypes, and programming interfaces for PostgreSQL are available for all important programming languages, including C, Perl, Python, Tcl, Java, and PHP. PostgreSQL Developer¿s Handbook provides a complete overview of the PostgreSQL database server and extensive coverage of its core features, including object orientation, PL/pgSQL, and the most important programming interfaces. The book introduces the reader to the language and syntax of PostgreSQL and then moves quickly into advanced programming topics.