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

Other ways to work with structured data


We now have covered the traditional ways of returning sets of structured data from functions. We will now start with the more interesting part. Other methods of passing around complex data structures have evolved in the world today.

Complex data types for modern world – XML and JSON

In the real world, most of the data is not in a single table and the database is not the main thing that most programmers focus on. Often, they don't even think of it at all, or at least would rather not think about it.

If you are a database developer working on the database side of things, it is often desirable to talk to the clients (be it web or application developers as your client, or programs as database clients) in the language they speak. Currently, the two most widely spoken data languages by the web applications and their developers are XML and JSON.

Both XML and JSON are text-based data formats, and as such, they can be easily saved into fields of type text. PostgreSQL...