Accessing PostgreSQL databases in Go

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2021-07-18 06:30:05

This post discusses some options for accessing PostgreSQL databases from Go. I'll only be covering low-level packages that provide access to the underlying database; this post is not about ORMs, which were covered earlier in this blog. The full source code accompanying this post is on GitHub.

There is a many-to-many relationship between courses and users (a user can take any number of courses, and each course has multiple users signed up), and a one-to-many relationship between courses and projects (a course has multiple projects, but a project belongs to a single course).

Note that the hashtags column is of the PostgreSQL array type: hashtags text[]; this is on purpose, to demonstrate how custom PostgreSQL types are modeled in the various Go approaches presented here.

Probably the most common way to access PostgreSQL databases in Go is using the standard library database/sql, along with pq as the database driver. The full code for this approach, applied to our sample database is available here; I'll present some relevant bits and pieces below: