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)

Extension data and backups

As you have already seen, an extension can include pretty much any database object, including regular tables. Such tables can be populated when the extension is installed or updated. They can also be modified by users during the life cycle of the database.

By default, backup tools such as pg_dump do not include extension objects to be dumped, since they can always be recreated from the extension scripts. However, if the user changes the data in the extension tables, this data will be lost (or, more accurately, it will not be automatically backed up).

One solution could be to back up this data manually, but this is tedious work. PostgreSQL allows us to indicate that a specific table must be included into the backup, even if it belongs to an extension. This is done by invoking the pg_extension_config_backup() special function with the following arguments...