Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 11 - Second Edition

By : Hans-Jürgen Schönig
Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 11 - Second Edition

By: Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Overview of this book

This second edition of Mastering PostgreSQL 11 helps you build dynamic database solutions for enterprise applications using the latest release of PostgreSQL, which enables database analysts to design both the physical and technical aspects of the system architecture with ease. This book begins with an introduction to the newly released features in PostgreSQL 11 to help you build efficient and fault-tolerant PostgreSQL applications. You’ll examine all of the advanced aspects of PostgreSQL in detail, including logical replication, database clusters, performance tuning, monitoring, and user management. You will also work with the PostgreSQL optimizer, configuring PostgreSQL for high speed, and see how to move from Oracle to PostgreSQL. As you progress through the chapters, you will cover transactions, locking, indexes, and optimizing queries to improve performance. Additionally, you’ll learn to manage network security and explore backups and replications, while understanding the useful extensions of PostgreSQL so that you can optimize the speed and performance of large databases. By the end of this book, you will be able to use your database to its utmost capacity by implementing advanced administrative tasks with ease.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
PostgreSQL Overview

Improving functions

So far, you have seen how to write basic functions as well as triggers in various languages. Of course, many more languages are supported. Some of the most prominent ones are PL/R (R is a powerful statistics package) and PL/v8 (which is based on the Google JavaScript engine). However, those languages are beyond the scope of this chapter (regardless of their usefulness).

In this section, we will focus on improving the performance of a function. There are a few ways in which we can speed up processing:

  • Reducing the number of function calls
  • Using cached plans
  • Giving hints to the optimizer

In this chapter, all three of these areas will be discussed.

Reducing the number of function calls

In many cases, performance...