Chapter 1. What Is a PostgreSQL Server?
If you think that a PostgreSQL Server is just a storage system and the only way to communicate with it is by executing SQL statements, you are limiting yourself tremendously. That is, you are using just a tiny part of the database's features.
A PostgreSQL Server is a powerful framework that can be used for all kinds of data processing, and even some non-data server tasks. It is a server platform that allows you to easily mix and match functions and libraries from several popular languages.
Consider this complicated, multilanguage sequence of work:
- Call a string parsing function in Perl
- Convert the string to XSLT and process the result using JavaScript
- Ask for a secure stamp from an external timestamping service, such as http://guardtime.com/, using their SDK for C
- Write a Python function to digitally sign the result
This multilanguage sequence of work can be implemented as a series of simple function calls using several of the available server programming languages. The developer who needs to accomplish all this work can just call a single PostgreSQL function without the need to be aware of how the data is being passed between languages and libraries:
SELECT convert_to_xslt_and_sign(raw_data_string);
In this book, we will discuss several facets of PostgreSQL Server programming. PostgreSQL has all of the native server-side programming features available in most larger database systems such as triggers, which are automated actions invoked automatically each time data is changed. However, it has uniquely deep abilities to override the built-in behavior down to very basic operators. This unique PostgreSQL ability comes from its catalog-driven design, which stores information about data types, functions, and access methods. The ability of PostgreSQL to load user-defined functions via dynamic loading makes it rapidly changeable without having to recompile the database itself. There are several things you can do with this flexibility of customization. Some examples of this customization include the following:
- Writing user-defined functions (UDF) to carry out complex computations
- Adding complicated constraints to make sure that the data in the server meets guidelines
- Creating triggers in many languages to make related changes to other tables, audit changes, forbid the action from taking place if it does not meet certain criteria, prevent changes to the database, enforce and execute business rules, or replicate data
- Defining new data types and operators in the database
- Using the geography types defined in the PostGIS package
- Adding your own index access methods for either the existing or new data types, making some queries much more efficient
What sort of things can you do with these features? There are limitless possibilities, such as the ones listed here:
- Write data extractor functions to get just the interesting parts from structured data, such as XML or JSON, without needing to ship the whole, possibly huge, document to the client application.
- Process events asynchronously, such as sending mails without slowing down the main application. You can create a mail queue for changes to user information, populated by a trigger. A separate mail-sending process can consume this data whenever it is notified by an application process.
- Implement a new data type to custom hash the passwords.
- Write functions, which provide inside information about the server, for example, cache contents, table-wise lock information, or the SSL certificate information of a client connection for a monitoring dashboard.
The rest of this chapter is presented as a series of descriptions of common data management tasks, showing how they can be solved in a robust and elegant way via server programming.
Note
The samples in this chapter are all tested to work, but they come with minimal commentary. They are used here just to show you various things that server programming can accomplish. The techniques that are described will be explained thoroughly in later chapters.
