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

Building an extension


We have already covered the basics of creating a script file and a .control file. Actually, that is all that is necessary for a PostgreSQL extension. You may simply copy these files into the shared extension directory on your computer and execute the following command:

CREATE EXTENSION postal;

This will install your extension into the currently selected database.

The shared extension path is dependent on how PostgreSQL is installed, but for Ubuntu, it is /usr/share/postgresql/9.2/extension.

However, there is a much better way to do this that works with any package manager on any platform.

PostgreSQL provides an extension building toolkit as a part of the server development package. To install this package on Ubuntu, you can type:

sudo apt-get install postgresql-dev-9.2

This will install all of the PostgreSQL source code necessary to create and install an extension. You would then create a file named Makefile in the same directory as the rest of your extension files. The...