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

Disallowing TRUNCATE


You may have noticed that the preceding trigger can easily be bypassed for DELETE if you delete everything using TRUNCATE.

While you cannot simply skip TRUNCATE by returning NULL (this works only for row-level BEFORE triggers), you still can make it impossible by raising an error if TRUNCATE is attempted. Create an AFTER trigger using the same function used previously for DELETE:

CREATE TRIGGER disallow_truncate 
  AFTER TRUNCATE ON delete_test1 
  FOR EACH STATEMENT 
EXECUTE PROCEDURE cancel_op(); 

And here you are, with no more TRUNCATE:

postgres=# TRUNCATE delete_test1; 
ERROR:  YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO TRUNCATE ROWS IN public.delete_test1 

Of course, you could also raise the error in a BEFORE trigger, but then you would need to write your own unconditional raise-error trigger function instead of cancel_op().