Introduction to PostgreSQL — Django interactive lesson

Database Engines

Django comes with a SQLite database which is great for testing and debugging at the beginning of a project.

However, it is not very suitable for production.

Django also support these database engines

PostgreSQL
MariaDB
MySQL
Oracle

We will take a closer look at the PostgreSQL database engine.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL database is an open source relational database, which should cover most demands you have when creating a database for a Django project.

It has a good reputation, it is reliable, and it perform well under most circumstances.

We will add a PostgreSQL database to our Django project.

To be able to use PostgreSQL in Django we have to install a package called psycopg2 .

Install psycopg2

Type this command in the command line to install the package. Make sure you are still inn the virtual environment:

pip install psycopg2-binary

The result should be something like this:

Collecting psycopg2-binary
 Downloading psycopg2_binary-2.9.10-cp313-cp313-win_amd64.whl.metadata (4.8 kB)
Downloading psycopg2_binary-2.9.10-cp313-cp313-win_amd64.whl (2.6 MB)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
2.6/2.6 MB
50.0 MB/s eta
0:00:00
Installing collected packages: psycopg2-binary
Successfully installed psycopg2-binary-2.9.10
[
notice
] A new release of pip is available:
24.3.1
 ->
25.0.1
[
notice
] To update, run:
python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip

The psycopg2 package is a driver that is necessary for PostgreSQL to work in Python.

We also need a server where we can host the database.

In this tutorial we have chosen the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, you will learn more about that in the next chapter .