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PostgreSQL Server Programming

PostgreSQL Server Programming

4.7 (9)
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PostgreSQL Server Programming

PostgreSQL Server Programming

4.7 (9)

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)
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PostgreSQL Server Programming
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

About this book's code examples


The sample output shown here has been created with PostgreSQL's psql utility, usually running on a Linux system. Most of the code will work the same way if you are using a GUI utility like pgAdmin3 to access the server instead. When you see lines like this:

postgres=# SELECT 1;

The postgres=# part is the prompt shown by the psql command.

Examples in this book have been tested using PostgreSQL 9.2. They will probably work on PostgreSQL version 8.3 and later. There have not been many major changes to how server programming happens in the last few versions of PostgreSQL. The syntax has become stricter over time to reduce the possibility of mistakes in server programming code. Due to the nature of those changes, most code from newer versions will still run on the older ones, unless it uses very new features. However, the older code can easily fail to run due to one of the newly-enforced restrictions.

Switching to the expanded display

When using the psql utility to execute a query, PostgreSQL normally outputs the result using vertically aligned columns:

$ psql -c "SELECT 1 AS test"
 test 
------
    1
(1 row)

$ psql
psql (9.2.1)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=# SELECT 1 AS test;
 test 
------
    1
(1 row)

You can tell when you're seeing a regular output because it will end up showing the number of rows.

This type of output is hard to fit into the text of a book like this. It's easier to print the output from what the program calls the expanded display, which breaks each column into a separate line. You can switch to expanded using either the -x command-line switch, or by sending \x to the psql program. Here is an example of using each:

$ psql -x -c "SELECT 1 AS test"
-[ RECORD 1 ]
test | 1

$ psql
psql (9.2.1)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=# \x
Expanded display is on.
postgres=# SELECT 1 AS test;
-[ RECORD 1 ]
test | 1

Notice how the expanded output doesn't show the row count, and it numbers each output row. To save space, not all of the examples in the book will show the expanded output being turned on. You can normally tell which type you're seeing by differences like this, whether you're seeing rows or RECORD. The expanded mode will be normally preferred when the output of the query is too wide to fit into the available width of the book.

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