🦮 A practical introduction to PostgreSQL in Go

PostgreSQL, also known as Postgres, is an object-relational database system with over 30 years of history. Appreciated for its high stability, performance, and open source, it has been used as the primary database in many advanced and enterprise projects. It is perfect as a database for web, mobile, geospatial and analytical applications. Its ease of use and advanced features make it the choice of both small startups and large enterprises as a long-term relational database.

According to StackShare many of the biggest tech companies use PostgreSQL in their stacks:

• Uber
• Netflix
• Instagram
• Spotify
• Reddit

and many others.

In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to use PostgreSQL in Go. We will create a simple application that connects to the database, define a data access layer using the Repository pattern, and implement CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations. Finally, we will show how to easily replace the database implementation by using the Repository pattern.

Who is this tutorial for?

This tutorial is suitable for both beginners and advanced programmers who want to learn or remember how to perform basic operations on a PostgreSQL database from within the Go language. However, it does not teach SQL and does not explain in detail how PostgreSQL works. The purpose is to connect and perform operations in a Go application.

It is a tour on how to build a data access layer using clean code practices and what are the popular ways to connect to PostgreSQL. Since we use very simple examples in the tutorial, it is a great introduction to building something more advanced, and we encourage you to come back to it whenever you need to create a data access layer in your new project.

The project code

The full code of the project created in this tutorial is available on Github here.