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 9. Scaling Your Database with PL/Proxy

If you have followed the advice in the previous chapters for doing all your database access through functions, you are in a great position to scale your database by "horizontally" distributing the data over multiple servers. Horizontal distribution means that you keep just a portion of a table on each "partition" database, and that you have a method to automatically access the right database when accessing the data.

We will gently introduce the concepts leading to the PL/Proxy partitioning language, and then delve into the syntax and proper usage of the language itself. Let's start with writing a scalable application from scratch. First, we will write it to be as highly performing as possible on one server. Then, we will scale it by spreading it out on several servers. We will first get this implemented in PL/Pythonu and then as samples done in the theme special language for this chapter—PL/Proxy.

Note

This approach is worth taking only if you...