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)

The PL/pgSQL Language

The PL/pgSQL language is the default PostgreSQL language to implement functions, procedures, and other general SQL-like executable code.

The idea behind PL/pgSQL is to provide a more flexible and rich language to allow for complex computations, conditionals, iterations, and error handling. PL/pgSQL allows us to group several operations, including SQL statements, into code blocks, which are stored and executed on the server side. This has the benefit of reducing the traffic among the client and the backend.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • What a block of code looks like
  • How to execute a block of code with the DO statement
  • How to declare, assign, and use variables, as well as how to print messages
  • Conditionals, iterations (loops), and special variables
  • How to deal with errors and exceptions