Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 12 - Third Edition

By : Hans-Jürgen Schönig
Book Image

Mastering PostgreSQL 12 - Third Edition

By: Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Overview of this book

Thanks to its reliability, robustness, and high performance, PostgreSQL has become the most advanced open source database on the market. This third edition of Mastering PostgreSQL helps you build dynamic database solutions for enterprise applications using the latest release of PostgreSQL, which enables database analysts to design both physical and technical aspects of system architecture with ease. Starting with an introduction to the newly released features in PostgreSQL 12, this book will help you build efficient and fault-tolerant PostgreSQL applications. You’ll thoroughly examine the advanced features of PostgreSQL, including logical replication, database clusters, performance tuning, monitoring, and user management. You’ll also work with the PostgreSQL optimizer, configure PostgreSQL for high speed, and understand how to move from Oracle to PostgreSQL. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll cover transactions, locking, indexes, and how to optimize queries for improved performance. Additionally, you’ll learn how to manage network security and explore backups and replications while understanding useful PostgreSQL extensions to help you in optimizing the performance of large databases. By the end of this PostgreSQL book, you’ll be able to get the most out of your database by implementing advanced administrative tasks effortlessly.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Basic Overview
4
Section 2: Advanced Concepts

Understanding various stored procedure languages

As we've already stated in this chapter, PostgreSQL gives you the power to write functions and store procedures in various languages. The following options are available, and are shipped along with the PostgreSQL core:

  • SQL
  • PL/pgSQL
  • PL/Perl and PL/PerlU
  • PL/Python
  • PL/Tcl and PL/TclU

SQL is the obvious choice for writing functions and it should be used whenever possible, as it gives the most freedom to the optimizer. However, if you want to write slightly more complex code, PL/pgSQL might be the language of your choice.

PL/pgSQL offers flow control and much more. In this chapter, some of the more advanced and lesser-known features of PL/pgSQL will be shown, but do keep in mind that this chapter is not meant to be a complete tutorial on PL/pgSQL.

The core contains code to run server-side functions in Perl. Basically, the logic...