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

Summary


As C is the language that PostgreSQL itself is written in, it is very hard to draw a distinction on what is an extension function using a defined API and what is hacking PostgreSQL itself.

Some of the topics that we did not touch at all were:

  • Creating new installable types from scratch—see contrib/hstore/ for a full implementation of a new type.

  • Creating new index methods—download some older version of PosrgreSQL to see how full text indexing support was provided as an add-on.

  • Implementing a new PL/* language—search for pl/lolcode for a language whose sole purpose is to demonstrate how a PotgreSQLs PL/* language should be written (see http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pllolcode/). You also may want to check out the source code for PL/Proxy for a clean and well maintained PL language. (The usage of PL/Proxy is described in the next chapter.)

Hopefully this chapter gave you enough info to at least start writing PostgreSQL extension functions in C.

If you need more than what is available here...