Book Image

PostgreSQL Server Programming

Book Image

PostgreSQL Server Programming

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (21 chapters)
PostgreSQL Server Programming Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

When to use PL/Perl


We will briefly discuss how to create Perl functions and use them in triggers. Some of you might ask when it is beneficial to use PL/Perl, since PostgreSQL supports a variety of languages that can be used to create triggers or write stored procedures/functions.

You might be more familiar with a language such as Perl than with Python or Tcl. This is a pretty good reason to choose a certain language over the other.

However, if the performance of the function is one of your considerations, then you might want to choose a language based on the nature of the code you want to write.

In general, PL/Perl will outperform PL/pgSQL, if the focus of the stored procedure is computational tasks, athematic, and string parsing and manipulation. However, PL/pgSQL will often be a clear winner if you need to access the database. PL/pgSQL is closely tied into the PostgreSQL execution engine and has a very low overhead of running a query, compared to other procedural languages.