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

When to create an extension


Well, first you have to understand that extensions are all about togetherness. Once the objects from a contrib module were installed, PostgreSQL provided no way to show a relationship between them. This led many developers to create their own (and sometimes rather ingenious) methods to version, update, upgrade, and uninstall all of the necessary "stuff" to get a feature to work.

So, the first question to ask yourself when contemplating a PostgreSQL extension as a way to publish your code is, "How does all of the "stuff" in my extension relate together?"

This question will help you make extensions that are as granular as reasonable. If the objective is to enhance PostgreSQL with the ability to provide an inventory management system, maybe it would be better to start with an extension that provides a bill of material's data type first, and subsequently build additional extensions that are dependent upon that one. The moral of the story is to dream big, but create...