I bought (and started reading) the book Seven Databases in Seven Weeks in order to have better understanding of the different SQL / NoSQL paradigms. What are the pros and cons of each approach and play around with each type.

In this post I want to share the installation process I had with PostgreSQL on Fedora.
I will write a different post about the book itelf.

The Installation
I don’t know why, but installing PostgreSQL on the Fedora wasn’t as easy as expected.
It took me several tries to make it work.

I went over and over on the tutorials, read posts and questions with the same problems I had.
Eventually I made it work. I am not sure whether this is the correct way, but it’s good enough for me to work on it.

The Errors
During my attempts, I got some errors.

The most annoying one, was:

psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
 Is the server running locally and accepting
 connections on Unix domain socket "/var/lib/pgsql/.s.PGSQL.5432"?

I also got

FATAL:  could not create lock file "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432.lock": Permission denied

Sometimes I got port 5432 already in use.

Took some time, but I managed to install it
I am not entirely sure how I made it work, but I’ll post here the actions I did.
(for my future self of-course).

Installation Instructions: http://www.postgresql.org/download/linux/redhat/

# install postgresql on the machine
sudo yum install postgresql-server

# fill the data directory (AKA init-db)
# REMEMBER - here it is: /var/lib/pgsql/data/
sudo postgresql-setup initdb

# Enable postgresql to be started on bootup:
# (I hope it works...)
sudo systemctl enable postgresql.service

The next steps were to run the service, login, create DB and start playing.
This was the part where I kept getting the errors describes above.

First step was to login as postgres user, which is created during installation.
You can’t start the server as sudo.
As I am (still) not a Linux expert, I had to figure out that w/o password for postgres, I’ll need to su from the root.

# Login
sudo -s
# password for root...

# switch to postgres
su - postgres

The next step was to start the service.
That was the painful issue. Although very satisfying after success.
After careful looking at the error message and some Googling, I decided to add the -D to the commands.
I didn’t try it before, as I thought it wasn’t necessary because I added PGDATA.
Eventually I am not using it.

So this is the command that worked for me:

pg_ctl start -D /var/lib/pgsql/data/

And now what…?

In my first attempts, whenever I tried to run a PG command (psql, createdb), I got the annoying error described above.
But now it worked !

As postgres user, I ran psql and I was logged in.
After that I could start working on the book.

Some Tips

• Don’t forget to add semi-colon at the end of the commands 🙂

• create extension tablefunc;
  create extension dict_xsyn;
  create extension fuzzystrmatch;
  create extension pg_trgm;
  create extension cube;
  

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Disclaimer
This post was made out of notes that I wrote to myself during the hard installation.
I am sure this is not the best (or maybe it is?)

In the following posts I will share the reading progress of the book.

I added a GitHub project with code I’m writing while reading the book.
https://github.com/eyalgo/seven-dbs-in-seven-weeks

(EDIT – I wrote this post at 2 AM, so I hoope there aren’t any major mistakes)