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 8. Writing Advanced Functions in C

In the previous chapter, we introduced you to the possibilities of untrusted pluggable languages being available to a PostgreSQL developer to achieve things impossible in most other relational databases.

While using a pluggable scripting language is enough for a large class of problems, there are two main categories, where they may fall short, performance and depth of functionality. Most scripting languages are quite a bit slower than optimized C code when executing the same algorithms. For a single function, this may not be the case because common things such as dictionary lookups or string matching have been optimized so well over the years, but in general C code will be faster than scripted code. Also, in cases where the function is called millions of times per query, the overhead of actually calling the function and converting the arguments and return values to and from the scripting language counterparts can be a significant portion of the run...