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

Visual debugging


The PL/pgSQL Debugger is a project hosted on pgFoundry that provides a debugging interface into PostgreSQL Version 8.2 or higher. The following statement is mentioned at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/edb-debugger/:

"The PL/pgSQL debugger lets you step through PL/pgSQL code, set and clear breakpoints, view and modify variables, and walk through the call stack. "

As you can see from the description, the PL/pgSQL Debugger can be quite a handy little tool to have in your arsenal.

Getting the debugger installed

Ok, now we move past the glamour, and need to actually get it running on your system. If you installed PostgreSQL with one of packages that contain the Debugger, installation is pretty simple. Otherwise, you will need to build it from source.

Building the PL/pgSQL Debugger from source is beyond the scope of this book. The best way to build the source would be to pull the latest version for the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) source control system and follow the README file...