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

Installing an extension


Extensions that have been packaged for you by your friendly distribution manager are very simple to install using the following command:

CREATE EXTENSION extension_name;

Most of the popular Linux distributions include a package called something like postgresql-contrib-9.2. This naming convention is left over from the contrib style installation of PostgreSQL objects. Don't worry, for PostgreSQL 9.2 this package will actually provide extensions rather than contrib modules.

To find out where the files were placed on Ubuntu 10.04 Linux, you can execute the following command:

pg_config --sharedir

This will show you the shared component's installation directory:

/usr/share/postgresql/9.2

The extensions will be located in a directory called extension, immediately below the shared directory. This will then be named /usr/share/postgresql/9.2/extension.

To see what extensions are available for you to install, try this command:

ls $(pg_config –sharedir)/extension/*.control

This...