A database is a named collection of SQL objects
(“database objects”). Generally, every database
object (tables, functions, etc.) belongs to one and only one
database. (However there are a few system catalogs, for example
pg_database
, that belong to a whole cluster and
are accessible from each database within the cluster.) More
accurately, a database is a collection of schemas and the schemas
contain the tables, functions, etc. So the full hierarchy is:
server, database, schema, table (or some other kind of object,
such as a function).
When connecting to the database server, a client must specify in its connection request the name of the database it wants to connect to. It is not possible to access more than one database per connection. However, an application is not restricted in the number of connections it opens to the same or other databases. Databases are physically separated and access control is managed at the connection level. If one PostgreSQL server instance is to house projects or users that should be separate and for the most part unaware of each other, it is therefore recommended to put them into separate databases. If the projects or users are interrelated and should be able to use each other's resources, they should be put in the same database but possibly into separate schemas. Schemas are a purely logical structure and who can access what is managed by the privilege system. More information about managing schemas is in Section 5.8.
Databases are created with the CREATE DATABASE
command
(see Section 22.2) and destroyed with the
DROP DATABASE
command
(see Section 22.5).
To determine the set of existing databases, examine the
pg_database
system catalog, for example
SELECT datname FROM pg_database;
The psql program's \l
meta-command
and -l
command-line option are also useful for listing the
existing databases.
The SQL standard calls databases “catalogs”, but there is no difference in practice.