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

Are untrusted languages inferior to trusted ones?


No, on the contrary, these languages are untrusted in the same way that a sharp knife is untrusted and should not be trusted to very small children, at least not without adult supervision. They have extra powers that ordinary SQL or even the trusted languages (such as PL/pgSQL) and trusted variants of the same language (PL/Perl versus PL/Perlu) don't have.

You can use the untrusted languages to directly read and write on the server's disks, and you can use it to open sockets and make Internet queries to the outside world. You can even send arbitrary signals to any process running on the database host. Generally, you can do anything the native language of the PL can do.

However, you probably should not trust arbitrary database users to have the right to define functions in these languages. Always think twice before giving all privileges on some untrusted language to a user or group by using the *u languages for important functions.

Can you use...