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

Chapter 2. Server Programming Environment

You have had a chance to get acquainted with the general idea of using PostgreSQL, but now we are going to answer the question of why anyone would choose PostgreSQL as a development platform. As much as I like to believe that it's an easy decision for everyone, it's not.

For starters, let's get rid of the optimistic idea that anyone chooses a database platform for technical reasons. Sure, we would all like to think that we are objective, and we base our decisions on a preponderance of the technical evidence. This preponderance of evidence then indicates which features are available and relevant to our application. We would then proceed to make a weighted choice in favor of the most advantageous platform, and use the balance of the evidence to create workarounds and alternatives where our choice falls short. The fact is, we don't really understand all of the requirements of the application until we are halfway through the development cycle. Here are...