Deciding on Useful Extensions

In Chapter 10, Making Sense of Backups and Replication, our focus was on replication, transaction log shipping, and logical decoding. After looking at mostly administration-related topics, the goal now is to look at a broader topic. In the PostgreSQL world, many things are done using extensions. Extensibility is one of the core design goals of PostgreSQL itself, and there are countless places in a server that allow developers to add code and functionality. One such concept that plays on the idea of extensibility is the idea of adding “extensions” to your server. The advantage of extensions is that features can be added without bloating the PostgreSQL core. Not bloating the database engine itself is important. Writing a database server is a long-term project, and therefore, the community has to ensure that the code base can be understood, maintained, and developed over a very long period of time. By allowing users to choose their preferred...