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

Predictability


This section could just as well have been titled "standards compliance," but I decided against it because the benefits of standards compliance in corporate projects are not obvious. The limitations of the common databases are well documented, and I will show you a few websites in a moment where you can make a comparison of who has the most "unintended behavior". I encourage you to read the material while thinking to yourself about the question, "Which method of feature development is most likely to make my application break in the future?"

http://www.sql-info.de/postgresql/postgres-gotchas.html

http://www.sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html

Spoiler alert: Stricter adherence to standards comes at the cost of not allowing ambiguous behavior. Not allowing ambiguous behavior makes the developer's life more difficult. Making the developer's life more difficult ensures that the interpretation of the commands that the developer gives will not change later, breaking the application.

Just how...