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

Immutable fields trigger


When you are depending on the fields in the rows as part of your audit record, you need to ensure that the values reflect reality. We were able to make sure that the last_changed_ * fields always contain the correct value, but how about the created_by and created_at values? These can easily be changed in later updates, but they should never change. Even initially, they can be set to false values, since default values can be easily overridden by giving any other value in the INSERT statement.

So, let's modify our changestamp() trigger function into a usagestamp() function, which makes sure that initial values are what they should be and that they stay like that:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION usagestamp()
  RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$
BEGIN
    IF TG_OP = 'INSERT' THEN
        NEW.created_by = SESSION_USER;
        NEW.created_at = CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;
    ELSE
        NEW.created_by = OLD.created_by;
        NEW.created_at = OLD.created_at;    
    END IF;

    NEW.last_changed_by...