PostgreSQL Server Programming, 2nd Edition

Extend PostgreSQL using PostgreSQL server programming to create, test, debug, and optimize a range of user-defined functions in your favorite programming language

About This Book

• Acquaint yourself with all the options to extend PostgreSQL using the programming language of your choice such as C++ and PL/Python
• Work with PostgreSQL 9.4 so you can immediately take advantage of all the improvements and new features
• Utilize the extensive code examples and many novel tips and tricks for maximum performance gain

Who This Book Is For

This book is for moderate to advanced PostgreSQL database professionals who wish to extend PostgreSQL, utilizing the most updated features of PostgreSQL 9.4. For a better understanding of this book, familiarity with writing SQL, a basic idea of query tuning, and some coding experience in your preferred language is expected.

In Detail

This book 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.

You will get to grips with creating libraries of useful code, grouping them into even more useful components, and distributing them to the community. Then, you will take a look at user-defined functions, and how to define and utilize them efficiently. You will also learn how to extract data from a multitude of foreign data sources and extend PostgreSQL to do it natively. What’s more, you can do all of this in a nifty debugging interface that will allow you to do it efficiently and reliably. This book explores all possible ways to extend PostgreSQL and write server-side code using various programming languages with concrete and easy-to-understand examples.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. What Is a PostgreSQL Server?
Chapter 2. Server Programming Environments
Chapter 3. Your First PL/pgSQL Function
Chapter 4. Returning Structured Data
Chapter 5. PL/pgSQL Trigger Functions
Chapter 6. PostgreSQL Event Triggers
Chapter 7. Debugging PL/pgSQL
Chapter 8. Using Unrestricted Languages
Chapter 9. Writing Advanced Functions in C
Chapter 10. Scaling Your Database with PL/Proxy
Chapter 11. PL/Perl – Perl Procedural Language
Chapter 12. PL/Tcl – Tcl Procedural Language
Chapter 13. Publishing Your Code as PostgreSQL Extensions
Chapter 14. PostgreSQL as an Extensible RDBMS