This chapter elaborates on the available clients for PostgreSQL. Clients exist in order to provide a user interface to
the PostgreSQL server (also called the backend).
The two most accessible clients for PostgreSQL are the command-line driven
psql
and a graphical
alternative,
PgAccess
. The
psql
client is installed by default, while
PgAccess
requires specification of the
--with-tcl
option during
compilation of the PostgreSQL source code (as mentioned in Chapter 2).
Basic information about the
psql
client is included in Chapter 4; this section
documents more advanced information about the
psql
client. The topics covered include a complete list of
command line options, and an explanation of each
psql
slash command. This section also contains
information on how to load SQL input from external files, use the
psql
history, and substitute variables
dynamically into SQL statements within
psql
.
