Before we dive in too far, I want to give you a little tour of what you're gonna be seeing, both on the website where you're watching this video and on the screen. You know, many times I'll be full screen like this and trying to explain something to you and pointing at stuff, that sort of thing. Sometimes you'll see graphics to help explain some theoretical concepts a little better.

Most of the time, I'm gonna be little and out of the way, and we're gonna be looking at this. This is an application called TablePlus. I have no affiliation with them, it is just a SQL GUI that I happen to really like. And the reason I like it is I find it very ergonomic for teaching and for day-to-day usage. If we were to do something like select * from users limit 10, then I can say like, "Okay, well now, if we take this, we come down here and we format this and we come up here and we say where, and we get a little bit of auto complete here."

I just find that this speeds up the process of teaching, so I'm not constantly fiddling around with, you know, something over here where it's like, "Okay, well, let me take this one. What was that last one we used? Let me pull that in."

This is psql, I'll show you how to use this. It's a great tool. I find that when we're doing a bunch of different things, having a GUI here is quite nice. Now, on the website itself you're watching this video on masteringpostgres.com, you can change the website to dark mode or light mode. If you change the website to dark mode, the actual interface, the video itself will change to dark mode, which is kind of insane, it's a little bit over the top. Hey, I know a lot of people like dark mode, and I know a lot of people like light mode, so why not? You can do that on, you know, the nav bar up the top of the website, and all of the video will change. Now, I will not change, I'm not gonna go dark mode. This is what you're gonna see, but the interface will change.

The version of Postgres that I'm using in this course is 17 RC1. I will call out when old versions don't have the right stuff that I'm teaching. I think there's some instances where prior to 10, certain things weren't available, or prior to 12, this function works differently. I will try to call that out, because I know not everyone is on 17, but I did want to be on the most recent version at the time of recording.

The place that I get my local Postgres is from the fine proprietors of Postgres.app. I'll leave the links down below for that. For Postgres.app, it's just a GUI that that gets Postgres up and running. I think it is very nice, it's very normie, it makes it very easy to spin up different versions if you need to do that.

There's another GUI option called DBngin. That's quite good, it includes Postgres, MySQL, Redis, and maybe a few others. It's by the same people that create TablePlus. I think it's the same person, I think it's an individual person that creates both of those apps. DBngin is free, Postgres.app is free. I'm not associated with either, they're both just really good.

If you don't want to use one of those normie GUIs, which is totally fine, we have written a full article on getting Postgres up and running on your local machine, it just doesn't make very engaging video. I'm not gonna show you how to get all of that up and running on a Linux, a Windows, and a Mac machine. Instead, we just wrote out an article. I'll leave a link to that below.

You can also get the test data or the data that I'm using here. You can get that down below, or you can spin up a database on Xata and follow along over there if you want. I think that is about it.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out and ask for help. Hopefully, that is an overview of the site, the video, the stuff that you'll see on screen. We can start doing some learning.