Book Image

PostgreSQL Server Programming

Book Image

PostgreSQL Server Programming

Overview of this book

Learn how to work with PostgreSQL as if you spent the last decade working on it. PostgreSQL is capable of providing you with all of the options that you have in your favourite development language and then extending that right on to the database server. With this knowledge in hand, you will be able to respond to the current demand for advanced PostgreSQL skills in a lucrative and booming market."PostgreSQL Server Programming" will show you that PostgreSQL is so much more than a database server. In fact, it could even be seen as an application development framework, with the added bonuses of transaction support, massive data storage, journaling, recovery and a host of other features that the PostgreSQL engine provides. This book will take you from learning the basic parts of a PostgreSQL function, then writing them in languages other than the built-in PL/PgSQL. You will see how to create libraries of useful code, group them into even more useful components, and distribute them to the community. You will see how to extract data from a multitude of foreign data sources, and then extend PostgreSQL to do it natively. And you can do all of this in a nifty debugging interface that will allow you to do it efficiently and with reliability.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
PostgreSQL Server Programming
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 10. Publishing Your Code as PostgreSQL Extensions

If you are new to PostgreSQL, now is the time to dance for joy.

Now that you're done dancing, I'll tell you why. You have managed to avoid the "bad old days" of contrib modules. Contrib modules are the installation systems that were used to install related PostgreSQL objects prior to Version 9.1. They may be additional data types, enhanced management functions, or just really any type of module you want to add to PostgreSQL. They consist of any group of related functions, views, tables, operators, types, and indexes that were lumped into an installation file and committed to the database in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, contrib modules only provided for installation, and nothing else. In fact, they were not really an installation system at all. They were just some unrelated SQL scripts that happened to install everything that the author thought you needed.

PostgreSQL extensions provide many new services that a package management system...