Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL

Book Image

Learning PostgreSQL

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. The book starts with the introduction of relational databases with PostegreSQL. It then moves on to covering data definition language (DDL) with emphasis on PostgreSQL and common DDL commands supported by ANSI SQL. You will then learn the data manipulation language (DML), and advanced topics like locking and multi version concurrency control (MVCC). This will give you a very robust background to tune and troubleshoot your application. The book then covers the implementation of data models in the database such as creating tables, setting up integrity constraints, building indexes, defining views and other schema objects. Next, it will give you an overview about the NoSQL capabilities of PostgreSQL along with Hstore, XML, Json and arrays. Finally by the end of the book, you'll learn to use the JDBC driver and manipulate data objects in the Hibernate framework.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Learning PostgreSQL
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 7. Server-Side Programming with PL/pgSQL

The ability to write functions in PostgreSQL is an amazing feature. One can perform any task within the scope of the database server. These tasks might be related directly to data manipulation such as data aggregation and auditing, or can be used to perform miscellaneous services such as statistics collection, monitoring, system information acquisition, and job scheduling.

In this chapter, our focus is the PL/pgSQL language. PL/pgSQL can be considered as the default PostgreSQL, which is a full-fledged procedural language. As mentioned earlier in Chapter 4, PostgreSQL Advanced Building Blocks, PL/pgSQL is installed by default in PostgreSQL.