Fascinating Reporting with Postgres psql and sendmail
Among many things, psql, the Postgres command line tool, can create decent output to share with coworkers and customers, and that is where many Postgres users stop. The extreme limits of psql's formatting will be explored, delving into Unicode and HTML reports and the backslash/meta commands. Pretty reports are useless unless good data can be reported. The past and current developers of Postgres have packed a wonderful set functionality into the query language such as array aggregation and un-nesting. The staggering usefulness of "DISTINCT ON ()" will also be shown (without stepping into the quagmire of window functions). Environmentally conscious developers don't want to dump endless reports onto paper, so the power of psql is paired with the power of the UNIX/Linux sendmail command to generate electronic reports to send to coworkers and customers. The icing on the cake will be an example set of simple database tables to manage recipients of an automated reporting system.