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

Fast capturing of database changes


Some obvious things to code in C are logging, or auditing triggers, which get called at each INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to a table. We have not set aside enough space in this book to explain everything needed for C triggers, but interested reader could look up the source code for the skytools package where you can find more than one way to write triggers in C.

The highly optimized C source for the two main triggers, logtriga and logutriga, includes everything you need to capture these changes to a table and even detecting table structure changes while the code is running.

The latest source code for skytools can be found at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/skytools.