Chapter 6. Debugging PL/pgSQL

This chapter is entirely optional. Since you have only produced the highest quality, bug-free code using the best possible algorithms, this text is probably a waste of your time. Of course your functions parse perfectly on the first try. Your views show exactly what they should—according to the enviously complete business and technical documentation that you wrote last month. There is no need for version control on your procedures, as there has only ever been a Version 1.

Since you are still reading this, I'm sure that you're a whole lot more like me. I spend about 10 percent of my time writing new code, and about 90 percent of it editing the mistakes and oversights that I (and others) made in the first 10 percent. In fact, it could be argued that no new code is ever written at all. Actually, a more accurate description of the process is that a dumb assertion is made, and then edited until the customer can no longer stand the Quality Assurance (QA) process. We...