PostgreSQL Server Programming

by Hannu Krosing

Take your skills with PostgreSQL to a whole new level with this fascinating guide to server programming. A step by step approach with illuminating examples will educate you in the full range of possibilities. Understand the extension framework of PostgreSQL, and leverage it in ways that you haven't even invented yet. In Detail 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. What you will learn from this book Approach This practical guide leads you through numerous aspects of working with PostgreSQL. Step by step examples allow you to easily set up and extend PostgreSQL. Who this book is written for "PostgreSQL Server Programming" is for moderate to advanced PostgreSQL database professionals. To get the best understanding of this book, you should have general experience in writing SQL, a basic idea of query tuning, and some coding experience in a language of your choice

Genres: Technology

264 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2012

Reviews

[Jayadevan M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Packt requested me to review the book PostgreSQL Server Programming by Hannu Krosing, Kirk Roybal and Jim Mlodgenski. I was more than happy to review the book since it gave me an opportunity to learn Server Programming in PostgreSQL. My experience with PostgreSQL so far mostly involved optimizing queries, designing tables, setting up and configuring the server and so on, and very little programming. About the book - it is about 240 pages, most of it very useful stuff. The book starts with rationale behind "programming on the server", follows it up with some guidelines on programmming best practices and then moves on to the real content. Starting with basic structure of a function, conditional expressions and options of returning data sets, the book really covers most of the ways in which one could write functions in PL/pgSQL. Triggers and the situations where triggers will be useful are covered. The book moves on to cover programming in PL/Python and C. In each case, the authors start with what is porbably the simplest possible program - 4-5 lines, and build on it to provide more complex ways of writing programs and provide real-life examples. PL/Proxy - one way of achieving scalability, is also covered in detail. The authors wrap up a good book with a chapter on working with PostgreSQL Extensions. The book is worth a purchase.

[Pinaraf · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a nice book that will guide you through PostgreSQL programming, from basics PL/pgSQL to C server side programming, with some triggers, some PL/Python…
I wrote a more extensive review on my blog, but to sum it up : this book will not teach you how to do complex queries, that's not the topic. The topic is what you can do, what you should and what you should not do on server side with PostgreSQL. And this book is great for that, because that topic isn't often mentionned in books, and that's what makes PostgreSQL the great open source SQL server it is.

[Vladyslav Bondarenko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helped me a lot to get into PL/pgSQL programming at the beginning. PostgreSQL indeed offers wide set of tools. Too bad features described in the book are subject to change.