Advanced Techniques in Go Programming/

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Getting to Know Our Database

Getting to Know Our Database

Let’s learn to connect to a database and query it for information.

We'll cover the following...

Working with a database

We most likely need to download an additional package for working with a database server such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MongoDB. In this case, we are using PostgreSQL and, therefore, need to download a Go package that allows us to communicate with PostgreSQL. There are two main Go packages for connecting to PostgreSQL—we are going to use the github.com/lib/pq package here, but it is up to you to decide which package best suits the needs of your project.

Note: There is another Go package for working with PostgreSQL called jackc/pgx.

We can download the package of our choice as follows:

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go get github.com/lib/pq

To make things simpler, the PostgreSQL server is executed from a Docker image using a docker-compose.yml file, which has the following contents:

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version: '3'
services:
  postgres:
    image: postgres
    container_name: postgres
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=educative
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=pass
      - POSTGRES_DB=master
    volumes:
      - ./postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data/
    networks:
      - psql
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
volumes:
  postgres:
networks:
  psql:
    driver: bridge

The default port number the PostgreSQL server listens to is 5432. Because we connect to that PostgreSQL server from the same machine, the hostname that is going to be used is localhost or, if we prefer an IP address, 127.0.0.1. If we are using a different PostgreSQL server, then, in the code that follows, we should change the connection details accordingly.

Note: In PostgreSQL, a schema is a namespace that contains named database ...