In Chapter 10, Making Sense of Backups and Replication, of this book, our attention was focused on replication, transaction log shipping, and logical decoding. After this mostly administration-related stuff, the goal is to aim at a broader topic. In the PostgreSQL world, many things are done through extensions. The advantage of extensions is that functionality can be added without bloating the PostgreSQL core. People can choose from sometimes-competing extensions and find what is best for them. The philosophy is to keep the core slim, relatively easy to maintain, and ready for the future.
In this chapter, some of the most widespread extensions for PostgreSQL are discussed. However, before digging deeper into the issue, I want to state that this chapter only features a list of extensions that I personally find useful. There are so many modules out...