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You're reading from  Mastering PostgreSQL 15 - Fifth Edition

Product typeBook
Published inJan 2023
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781803248349
Edition5th Edition
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Hans-Jürgen Schönig
Hans-Jürgen Schönig
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Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Hans-Jürgen Schönig has 20 years' experience with PostgreSQL. He is the CEO of a PostgreSQL consulting and support company called CYBERTEC PostgreSQL International GmbH. It has successfully served countless customers around the globe. Before founding CYBERTEC PostgreSQL International GmbH in 2000, he worked as a database developer at a private research company that focused on the Austrian labor market, where he primarily worked on data mining and forecast models. He has also written several books about PostgreSQL.
Read more about Hans-Jürgen Schönig

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Improving functions

So far, you have seen how to write basic functions and triggers in various languages. Of course, many more languages are supported. Some of the most prominent ones are PL/R (R is a powerful statistics package) and PL/v8 (which is based on the Google JavaScript engine). However, those languages are beyond the scope of this chapter (regardless of their usefulness).

In this section, we will focus on improving the performance of a function. There are a few ways by which we can speed up processing:

  • Reducing the number of function calls
  • Using cached plans
  • Giving hints to the optimizer

In this section, all three of these topics will be discussed. Let’s get started with reducing the number of function calls and see how this can be done.

Reducing the number of function calls

In many cases, performance is bad because functions are called way too often. In my opinion—and I cannot stress this point enough—calling things too...

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Mastering PostgreSQL 15 - Fifth Edition
Published in: Jan 2023Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781803248349

Author (1)

author image
Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Hans-Jürgen Schönig has 20 years' experience with PostgreSQL. He is the CEO of a PostgreSQL consulting and support company called CYBERTEC PostgreSQL International GmbH. It has successfully served countless customers around the globe. Before founding CYBERTEC PostgreSQL International GmbH in 2000, he worked as a database developer at a private research company that focused on the Austrian labor market, where he primarily worked on data mining and forecast models. He has also written several books about PostgreSQL.
Read more about Hans-Jürgen Schönig