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

Installing an extension from PGXN


The PostgreSQL Extension Network provides a platform-independent tool to install PostgreSQL extensions. This tool is written in Python, and uses the Python installation system for distribution of itself. This is handy because the Python distribution system exists virtually on every PostgreSQL supportable platform and makes it very simple to get PostgreSQL extensions distributed to the community. The extension installer works with a single set of instructions on all targets:

easy_install pgxnclient
Installing pgxncli.py script to /usr/local/bin
Installing pgxn script to /usr/local/bin
Processing dependencies for pgxnclient
Finished processing dependencies for pgxnclient

Now you have the tools installed to manage PostgreSQL extensions provided by the PostgreSQL Extension Network.

Installing extensions is not really simple. For example, if we had a requirement to use a new tinyint data type, we could add it with this command:

pgxn install tinyint
INFO: best...