Book Image

PostgreSQL 11 Server Side Programming Quick Start Guide

By : Luca Ferrari
Book Image

PostgreSQL 11 Server Side Programming Quick Start Guide

By: Luca Ferrari

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is a rock-solid, scalable, and safe enterprise-level relational database. With a broad range of features and stability, it is ever increasing in popularity.This book shows you how to take advantage of PostgreSQL 11 features for server-side programming. Server-side programming enables strong data encapsulation and coherence. The book begins with the importance of server-side programming and explains the risks of leaving all the checks outside the database. To build your capabilities further, you will learn how to write stored procedures, both functions and the new PostgreSQL 11 procedures, and create triggers to perform encapsulation and maintain data consistency. You will also learn how to produce extensions, the easiest way to package your programs for easy and solid deployment on different PostgreSQL installations.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Custom data types

Each custom data type must have a unique name that can be fully qualified if the type belongs to a specific schema, otherwise the type will be created in the current schema.

Data types are created by means of the CREATE TYPE command, as you will see in detail in the following sections. Each data type belongs to the user that creates it. It is possible to drop a type with the DROP TYPE command, as well as to change the type definition via ALTER TYPE. However, changes are limited to the specific data type (as you will see in detail in the next sections).

Available custom data types can be inspected with the \dT (describe types) psql command. Types are handled in the pg_type system catalog, which provides the basic information about the type (for instance, its name, size, and ownership), while specific implementation details can be handled in separated tables....