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

Why PL/pgSQL?


PL/pgSQL is a powerful SQL scripting language heavily influenced by PL/SQL, the stored procedure language distributed with Oracle. It is included in the vast majority of PostgreSQL installations as a standard part of the product, so it usually requires no setup at all to begin.

PL/pgSQL also has a dirty little secret. The PostgreSQL developers don't want you to know that it is a full-fledged SQL development language, capable of doing pretty much anything within the PostgreSQL database.

Why is that a secret? For years, PostgreSQL did not claim to have stored procedures. PL/pgSQL functions were originally designed to return scalar values and were intended for simple mathematical tasks and trivial string manipulation.

Over the years, PL/pgSQL grew a rich set of control structures and gained the ability to be used by triggers, operators, and indexes. In the end, the developers were grudgingly forced to admit that they had a complete stored procedure development system on their hands...