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

Summary


Wow, this has been a long hard road to getting an extension configured and installed. We have used programming skills, system administrative skills, database administrative skills, and wiki editing. Along the way we saw some ruby, python, shell scripting, PL/pgSQL, and MediaWiki.

Believe it or not, this is the simplified process. Hard to imagine, eh? Well, continuous work is being done on the PostgreSQL Extension Network to further simplify this catastrophe of a development system. My thanks go out to David E. Wheeler and crew for making this new system available. As the framework now exists to help with the task, there will be dramatic improvement coming in the months and years ahead.

Now that I'm done complaining about it, this extension system is actually revolutionary. I say this because no other database platform provides any such framework at all. PostgreSQL is at the head of the pack when it comes to the ability to make changes to the basic functionality of the product. The...