Programming best practices

Developing application software is complicated. Some of the approaches to help manage that complexity are so popular that they've been given simple acronyms to remember them. Next, we'll introduce some of these principles and show how server programming helps make them easier to follow.

KISS – keep it simple stupid

One of the main techniques to successful programming is writing simple code. That is, writing code that you can easily understand three years from now, and that others can understand as well. It is not always achievable, but it almost always makes sense to write your code in the simplest way possible. You may rewrite parts of it later for various reasons such as speed, code compactness, to show off how clever you are, and so on. But always write the code first in a simple way, so you can absolutely be sure that it does what you want. Not only do you get working on code fast, you also have something to compare to when you try more advanced ways to do the same thing.

And remember, debugging is harder than writing code; so if you write the code in the most complex way you can, you will have a really hard time debugging it.

It is often easier to write a set returning function instead of a complex query. Yes, it will probably run slower than the same thing implemented as a single complex query due to the fact that the optimizer can do very little to code written as functions, but the speed may be sufficient for your needs. If more speed is needed, it's very likely to refactor the code piece by piece, joining parts of the function into larger queries where the optimizer has a better chance of discovering better query plans until the performance is acceptable again.

Remember that for most of the times, you don't need the absolutely fastest code. For your clients or bosses, the best code is the one that does the job well and arrives on time.

DRY – don't repeat yourself

This one means to try to implement any piece of business logic just once, and put the code for doing it in the right place.

It may sometimes be hard, for example you do want to do some checking of your web forms in the browser, but still do the final check in the database. But as a general guideline it is very much valid.

Server programming helps a lot here. If your data manipulation code is in the database near the data, all the data users have easy access to it, and you will not need to manage a similar code in a C++ Windows program, two PHP websites, and a bunch of Python scripts doing nightly management tasks. If any of them needs to do this thing to a customer's table, they just call:

SELECT * FROM  do_this_thing_to_customers(arg1, arg2, arg3);

And that's it!

If the logic behind the function needs changing, you just change the function with no downtime and no complicated orchestration of pushing database query updates to several clients. Once the function is changed in the database, it is changed for all users.

YAGNI – you ain't gonna need it

In other words, don't do more than you absolutely need to.

If you have a creepy feeling that your client is not yet well aware of what the final database will look like or what it will do, it's helpful to resist the urge to design "everything" into the database. A much better way is to do the minimal implementation that satisfies the current spec, but do it with extensibility in mind. It is much easier to "paint yourself into a corner" when implementing a big spec with large imaginary parts.

If you organize your access to the database through functions, it is often possible to do even large rewrites of business logic without touching the frontend application code. Your application still does SELECT * FROM do_this_thing_to_customers(arg1, arg2, arg3) even after you have rewritten the function five times and changed the whole table structure twice.

SOA – service-oriented architecture

Usually when you hear the acronym SOA, it comes from Enterprise Software people selling you a complex set of SOAP services. But the essence of the SOA is organizing your software platform as a set of services that clients and other services call for performing certain well-defined atomic tasks, such as:

• Checking a user's password and credentials

• Presenting him/her with a list of his/her favorite websites

• Selling him/her a new red dog collar with complementary membership in the red-collared dog club

These services can be implemented as SOAP calls with corresponding WSDL definitions and Java servers with servlet containers, and complex management infrastructure. They can also be a set of PostgreSQL functions, taking a set of arguments and returning a set of values. If arguments or return values are complex, they can be passed as XML or JSON, but often a simple set of standard PostgreSQL data types is enough. In Chapter 9, Scaling Your Database with PL/Proxy, we will learn how to make such PostgreSQL-based SOA service infinitely scalable.

Type extensibility

Some of the preceding techniques are available in other databases, but PostgreSQL's extensibility does not stop here. In PostgreSQL, you can just write User-defined functions (UDFs) in any of the most popular scripting languages. You can also define your own types, not just domains, which are standard types with some extra constraints attached, but new full-fledged types too.

For example, a Dutch company MGRID has developed value with unit set of data types, so that you can divide 10 km by 0.2 hour and get the result in 50 km/h. Of course, you can also cast the same result to meters per second or any other unit of speed. And yes, you can get this as a fraction of c—the speed of light.

This kind of functionality needs both the types themselves and overloaded operands, which know that if you divide distance by time then the result is speed. You will also need user-defined casts, which are automatically- or manually-invoked conversion functions between types.

MGRID developed this for use in medical applications where the cost of error can be high—the difference between 10 ml and 10 cc can be vital. But using a similar system could also have averted many other disasters, where using wrong units has ended with producing bad computation results. If the unit is always there together with the amount, the possibility for these kinds of errors is very much diminished. You can also add your own index methods if you have some programming skills and your problem domain is not well served by the existing indexes. There is already a respectable set of index types included in the core PostgreSQL, as well as several others which are developed outside the core.

The latest index method which became officially included in PostgreSQL is KNN (K Nearest Neighbor)—a clever index, which can return K rows ordered by their distance from the desired search target. One use of KNN is in fuzzy text search, where this can be used for ranking full-text search results by how well they match the search terms. Before KNN, this kind of thing was done by querying all rows which matched even a little, and then sorting all these by the distance function and returning K top rows as the last step.

If done using KNN index, the index access can start returning the rows in the desired order; so a simple LIMIT K function will return you the K top matches.

The KNN index can also be used for real distances, for example answering the request "Give me the 10 nearest pizza places to central station."

As you see, index types are separate from the data types they index. As another example, the same GIN (General Inverted Index) can be used for full-text search (together with stemmers, thesauri, and other text processing stuff) as well as indexing elements of integer arrays.