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

Improving functions

So far, you have seen how to write basic functions and triggers in various languages. Of course, many more languages are supported. Some of the most prominent ones are PL/R (R is a powerful statistics package) and PL/v8 (which is based on the Google JavaScript engine). However, those languages are beyond the scope of this chapter (regardless of their usefulness).

In this section, we will focus on improving the performance of a function. There are a few ways in which we can speed up processing:

  • Reducing the number of function calls
  • Using cached plans
  • Giving hints to the optimizer

In this chapter, all three of these areas will be discussed.

Reducing the number of function calls

In many cases, performance...