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

Summary


In this chapter, we have gone over the process of database sharding for databases that are too big to take the write load on a single host, or where you just want to have the added resilience of having a system, where one host being down does not bring the whole system down.

In short, the process is:

  • Decide which tables you want to split over multiple hosts

  • Add the partition databases and move the data

  • Set up the proxy functions for all the functions accessing those tables

  • Watch for a little while that everything is working

  • Relax

Also, we also took a brief look at using PL/Proxy for simple remote queries to other PostgreSQL databases, which may be handy for some tasks even after the new Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW) functionality in PostgreSQL replaced it for many uses.

While PL/Proxy is not for everyone, it may well save the day if you are suddenly faced with rapid database growth and have the need for an easy and clean way to spread the database over many hosts.