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

Additional resources for C


In this chapter, we were able to only give you a very basic introduction to what is possible in C. Here is some advice on how to get more information.

First, there is of course the chapter C-Language Functions in the PostgreSQL manual. This can be found online at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/xfunc-c.html and as with most of the online PostgreSQL manual, you usually can get to older versions if they exist.

The next one, not surprisingly, is the PostgreSQL source code itself. However, you will usually not get very far by just opening the files or using grep to find what you need. If you are good with using ctags (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctags) or other similar tool, it is definitely recommended.

Also, if you are new to these types of large-code exploration systems, then a really good resource for finding and examining PostgreSQL internals is maintained at http://doxygen.postgresql.org/. This points to the latest git master so it may not be accurate...