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 6. Debugging PL/pgSQL

This chapter is entirely optional. Since you have only produced the highest quality, bug-free code using the best possible algorithms, this text is probably a waste of your time. Of course your functions parse perfectly on the first try. Your views show exactly what they should—according to the enviously complete business and technical documentation that you wrote last month. There is no need for version control on your procedures, as there has only ever been a Version 1.

Since you are still reading this, I'm sure that you're a whole lot more like me. I spend about 10 percent of my time writing new code, and about 90 percent of it editing the mistakes and oversights that I (and others) made in the first 10 percent. In fact, it could be argued that no new code is ever written at all. Actually, a more accurate description of the process is that a dumb assertion is made, and then edited until the customer can no longer stand the Quality Assurance (QA) process. We...