Installing an extension

Extensions that have been packaged for you by your friendly distribution manager are very simple to install using the following command:

CREATE EXTENSION extension_name;

Most of the popular Linux distributions include a package called something like postgresql-contrib-9.2. This naming convention is left over from the contrib style installation of PostgreSQL objects. Don't worry, for PostgreSQL 9.2 this package will actually provide extensions rather than contrib modules.

To find out where the files were placed on Ubuntu 10.04 Linux, you can execute the following command:

pg_config --sharedir

This will show you the shared component's installation directory:

/usr/share/postgresql/9.2

The extensions will be located in a directory called extension, immediately below the shared directory. This will then be named /usr/share/postgresql/9.2/extension.

To see what extensions are available for you to install, try this command:

ls $(pg_config –sharedir)/extension/*.control

This...