PostgreSQL Server Programming - Second Edition

Chapter 1. What Is a PostgreSQL Server?

If you think that a PostgreSQL Server is just a storage system and the only way to communicate with it is by executing SQL statements, you are limiting yourself tremendously. That is, you are using just a tiny part of the database's features.

A PostgreSQL Server is a powerful framework that can be used for all kinds of data processing, and even some non-data server tasks. It is a server platform that allows you to easily mix and match functions and libraries from several popular languages.

Consider this complicated, multilanguage sequence of work:

Call a string parsing function in Perl
Convert the string to XSLT and process the result using JavaScript
Ask for a secure stamp from an external timestamping service, such as http://guardtime.com/, using their SDK for C
Write a Python function to digitally sign the result

This multilanguage sequence of work can be implemented as a series of simple function calls using several of the available server programming languages. The developer who needs to accomplish all this work can just call a single PostgreSQL function without the need to be aware of how the data is being passed between languages and libraries:

SELECT convert_to_xslt_and_sign(raw_data_string);

In this book, we will discuss several facets of PostgreSQL Server programming. PostgreSQL has all of the native server-side programming features available in most larger database systems such as triggers, which are automated actions invoked automatically each time data is changed. However, it has uniquely deep abilities to override the built-in behavior down to very basic operators. This unique PostgreSQL ability comes from its catalog-driven design, which stores information about data types, functions, and access methods. The ability of PostgreSQL to load user-defined functions via dynamic loading makes it rapidly changeable without having to recompile the database itself. There are several things you can do with this flexibility of customization. Some examples of this customization include the following:

Writing user-defined functions (UDF) to carry out complex computations
Adding complicated constraints to make sure that the data in the server meets guidelines
Creating triggers in many languages to make related changes to other tables, audit changes, forbid the action from taking place if it does not meet certain criteria, prevent changes to the database, enforce and execute business rules, or replicate data
Defining new data types and operators in the database
Using the geography types defined in the PostGIS package
Adding your own index access methods for either the existing or new data types, making some queries much more efficient

What sort of things can you do with these features? There are limitless possibilities, such as the ones listed here:

Write data extractor functions to get just the interesting parts from structured data, such as XML or JSON, without needing to ship the whole, possibly huge, document to the client application.
Process events asynchronously, such as sending mails without slowing down the main application. You can create a mail queue for changes to user information, populated by a trigger. A separate mail-sending process can consume this data whenever it is notified by an application process.
Implement a new data type to custom hash the passwords.
Write functions, which provide inside information about the server, for example, cache contents, table-wise lock information, or the SSL certificate information of a client connection for a monitoring dashboard.

The rest of this chapter is presented as a series of descriptions of common data management tasks, showing how they can be solved in a robust and elegant way via server programming.

Note

The samples in this chapter are all tested to work, but they come with minimal commentary. They are used here just to show you various things that server programming can accomplish. The techniques that are described will be explained thoroughly in later chapters.

Why program in the server?

Developers program their code in a number of different languages, and it can be designed to run just about anywhere. When writing an application, some people follow the philosophy that as much of the logic as possible for the application should be pushed to the client. We see this in the explosion of applications leveraging JavaScript inside browsers. Others like to push the logic into the middle tier, with an application server handling the business rules. These are all valid ways to design an application, so why will you want to program in the database server?

Let's start with a simple example. Many applications include a list of customers who have a balance in their account. We'll use this sample schema and data:

CREATE TABLE accounts(owner text, balance numeric, amount numeric);
INSERT INTO accounts VALUES ('Bob',100);
INSERT INTO accounts VALUES ('Mary',200);

Tip

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files for all the Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

When using a database, the most common way to interact with it, is to use SQL queries. If you want to move 14 dollars from Bob's account to Mary's account with simple SQL, you can do so using the following:

UPDATE accounts SET balance = balance - 14.00 WHERE owner = 'Bob';
UPDATE accounts SET balance = balance + 14.00 WHERE owner = 'Mary';

However, you also have to make sure that Bob actually has enough money (or credit) in his account. Note that if anything fails, then none of the transactions will happen. In an application program, this is how the preceding code snippet will be modified:

BEGIN;
SELECT amount FROM accounts WHERE owner = 'Bob' FOR UPDATE;
-- now in the application check that the amount is actually bigger -- than 14
UPDATE accounts SET amount = amount - 14.00 WHERE owner = 'Bob';
UPDATE accounts SET amount = amount + 14.00 WHERE owner = 'Mary';
COMMIT;

Did Mary actually have an account? If she did not, the last UPDATE command will succeed by updating zero rows. If any of the checks fail, you should do ROLLBACK instead of COMMIT. Once you have done all this for all the clients that transfer money, a new requirement will invariably arrive. Perhaps, the minimum amount that can be transferred is now 5.00. You will need to revisit the code in all your clients again.

So, what can you do to make all of this more manageable, secure, and robust? This is where server programming, executing code on the database server itself, can help. You can move the computations, checks, and data manipulations entirely into a UDF on the server. This not only ensures that you have only one copy of operation logic to manage, but also makes things faster by not requiring several round trips between the client and the server. If required, you can also make sure that only the essential information is given out from the database. For example, there is no business for most client applications to know how much money Bob has in his account. Mostly, they only need to know whether there is enough money to make the transfer, or to be more specific, whether the transaction succeeded.

Using PL/pgSQL for integrity checks

PostgreSQL includes its own programming language named PL/pgSQL that is aimed to integrate easily with SQL commands. PL stands for procedural language, and this is just one of the many languages available for writing server code. pgSQL is the shorthand for PostgreSQL.

Unlike basic SQL, PL/pgSQL includes procedural elements, such as the ability to use the if/then/else statements and loops. You can easily execute SQL statements, or even loop over the result of a SQL statement in the language.

The integrity checks needed for the application can be done in a PL/pgSQL function that takes three arguments: names of the payer and the recipient and the amount to be paid. This sample also returns the status of the payment:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION transfer( 
              i_payer text, 
              i_recipient text, 
              i_amount numeric(15,2))
RETURNS text 
AS
$$
DECLARE
  payer_bal numeric;
BEGIN
  SELECT balance INTO payer_bal 
     FROM accounts 
  WHERE owner = i_payer FOR UPDATE;
  IF NOT FOUND THEN
    RETURN 'Payer account not found';
  END IF;
  IF payer_bal < i_amount THEN
    RETURN 'Not enough funds';
  END IF;

  UPDATE accounts 
        SET balance = balance + i_amount 
    WHERE owner = i_recipient;
  IF NOT FOUND THEN
    RETURN 'Recipient does not exist';
  END IF;

  UPDATE accounts 
         SET balance = balance - i_amount 
   WHERE owner = i_payer;
  RETURN 'OK';
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Here are a few examples of the usage of this function, assuming that you haven't executed the previously proposed UPDATE statements yet:

postgres=# SELECT * FROM accounts;
 owner | balance 
-------+---------
 Bob   |     100
 Mary  |     200
(2 rows)

postgres=# SELECT transfer('Bob','Mary',14.00);
 transfer 
----------
 OK
(1 row)

postgres=# SELECT * FROM accounts;
 owner | balance 
-------+---------
 Mary  |  214.00
 Bob   |   86.00
(2 rows)

Your application will need to check the return code and decide how to handle these errors. As long as it is written to reject any unexpected value, you can extend this function to do more checking, such as the minimum transferrable amount, and you can be sure it will be prevented. The following three errors can be returned:

postgres=# SELECT * FROM transfer('Fred','Mary',14.00);
        transfer         
-------------------------
 Payer account not found
(1 row)

postgres=# SELECT * FROM transfer('Bob','Fred',14.00);
         transfer         
--------------------------
 Recipient does not exist
(1 row)

postgres=# SELECT * FROM transfer('Bob','Mary',500.00);
     transfer     
------------------
 Not enough funds
(1 row)

For these checks to always work, you will need to make all the transfer operations go through the function, rather than manually changing the values with SQL statements. One way to achieve this, is by revoking update privileges from users and from a user with higher privileges that define the transfer function with SECURITY DEFINER. This will allow the restricted users to run the function as if they have higher privileges similar to the function's creator.

About this book's code examples

The sample output shown here has been created with the psql utility of PostgreSQL, usually running on a Linux system. Most of the code will work the same way if you are using a GUI utility such as pgAdmin3 to access the server instead. Take an example of the following line of code:

postgres=# SELECT 1;

The postgres=# part is the prompt shown by the psql command.

The examples in this book have been tested using PostgreSQL 9.3. They will probably work on PostgreSQL Version 8.3 and later. There haven't been many major changes to how server programming happens in the last few versions of PostgreSQL. The syntax has become stricter over time to reduce the possibility of mistakes in the server programming code. Due to the nature of these changes, most code from newer versions will still run on the older ones, unless it uses very new features. However, the older code can easily fail to run due to one of the newly enforced restrictions.

Switching to the expanded display

When using the psql utility to execute a query, PostgreSQL normally outputs the result using vertically aligned columns:

$ psql -c "SELECT 1 AS test"
 test 
------
    1
(1 row)

$ psql
psql (9.3.2)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=# SELECT 1 AS test;
 test 
------
    1
(1 row)

You can tell when you're seeing a regular output because it will end up showing the number of rows.

This type of output is hard to fit into the text of a book such as this. It's easier to print the output from what the program calls the expanded display, which breaks each column into a separate line. You can switch to the expanded display using either the -x command-line switch or by sending \x to the psql program. Here's an example of using each of these:

$ psql -x -c "SELECT 1 AS test"
-[ RECORD 1 ]
test | 1

$ psql
psql (9.3.2)
Type "help" for help.
postgres=# \x
Expanded display is on.
postgres=# SELECT 1 AS test;
-[ RECORD 1 ]
test | 1

Notice how the expanded output doesn't show the row count and numbers each output row. To save space, not all of the examples in the book will show the expanded output being turned on. You can normally tell which type you can see, by differences such as whether you're seeing rows or RECORD. The expanded mode will normally be preferred when the output of the query is too wide to fit into the available width of the book. It is a good idea to set the expanded mode to auto. This will automatically switch to expanded mode for tables with a lot of columns. You can turn on the expanded mode using \x auto:

postgres=# \x auto
Expanded display is used automatically.

Managing related data with triggers

Server programming can also mean setting up automated actions (triggers), so that some operations in the database cause some other things to happen as well. For example, you can set up a process where making an offer on some items is automatically reserved to them being in the stock table.

So, let's create a fruit stock table, as shown here:

CREATE TABLE fruits_in_stock (
    name text PRIMARY KEY,
    in_stock integer NOT NULL,
    reserved integer NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
    CHECK (in_stock between 0 and 1000 ),
    CHECK (reserved <= in_stock)
);

The CHECK constraints make sure that some basic rules are followed: you can't have more than 1000 fruits in stock (they'll probably go bad), you can't have a negative stock, and you can't reserve more than what you have. The fruit_offer table will contain the fruits from stock which are on offer. When we insert a row in the fruit_offer table. The offered amount will be reserved in the stock table as shown:

CREATE TABLE fruit_offer (
    offer_id serial PRIMARY KEY,
    recipient_name text,
    offer_date timestamp default current_timestamp,
    fruit_name text REFERENCES fruits_in_stock,
    offered_amount integer
);

The offer table has an ID for the offer (so you can distinguish between offers later), recipient, date, offered fruit name, and offered amount.

In order to automate the reservation management, you first need a TRIGGER function, which implements the management logic:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION reserve_stock_on_offer () RETURNS trigger AS $$
    BEGIN
        IF TG_OP = 'INSERT' THEN
            UPDATE fruits_in_stock
         SET reserved = reserved + NEW.offered_amount
       WHERE name = NEW.fruit_name;
  ELSIF TG_OP = 'UPDATE' THEN
      UPDATE fruits_in_stock
         SET reserved = reserved - OLD.offered_amount
                                     + NEW.offered_amount
       WHERE name = NEW.fruit_name;
  ELSIF TG_OP = 'DELETE' THEN
     UPDATE fruits_in_stock
        SET reserved = reserved - OLD.offered_amount
      WHERE name = OLD.fruit_name;
        END IF;
        RETURN NEW;
    END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

You have to tell PostgreSQL to call this function each and every time the offer row is changed:

CREATE TRIGGER manage_reserve_stock_on_offer_change
AFTER INSERT OR UPDATE OR DELETE ON fruit_offer FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE reserve_stock_on_offer();

After this, we are ready to test the functionality. First, we will add some fruits to our stock:

INSERT INTO fruits_in_stock VALUES('APPLE',500);
INSERT INTO fruits_in_stock VALUES('ORANGE',500);

Then, we will check the stock (using the expanded display):

postgres=# \x
Expanded display is on.
postgres=# SELECT * FROM fruits_in_stock;
-[ RECORD 1 ]----
name     | APPLE
in_stock | 500
reserved | 0
-[ RECORD 2 ]----
name     | ORANGE
in_stock | 500
reserved | 0

Next, let's make an offer of 100 apples to Bob:

postgres=# INSERT INTO fruit_offer(recipient_name,fruit_name,offered_amount) VALUES('Bob','APPLE',100);
INSERT 0 1
postgres=# SELECT * FROM fruit_offer;
-[ RECORD 1 ]--+---------------------------
offer_id       | 1
recipient_name | Bob
offer_date     | 2013-01-25 15:21:15.281579
fruit_name     | APPLE
offered_amount | 100

On checking the stock, we see that indeed 100 apples are reserved, as shown in the following code snippet:

postgres=# SELECT * FROM fruits_in_stock;
-[ RECORD 1 ]----
name     | ORANGE
in_stock | 500
reserved | 0
-[ RECORD 2 ]----
name     | APPLE
in_stock | 500
reserved | 100

If we change the offered amount, the reserved amount also changes:

postgres=# UPDATE fruit_offer SET offered_amount = 115 WHERE offer_id = 1;
UPDATE 1
postgres=# SELECT * FROM fruits_in_stock;
-[ RECORD 1 ]----
name     | ORANGE
in_stock | 500
reserved | 0
-[ RECORD 2 ]----
name     | APPLE
in_stock | 500
reserved | 115

We also get some extra benefits. First, because of the constraint on the stock table, you can't sell the reserved apples:

postgres=# UPDATE fruits_in_stock SET in_stock = 100 WHERE name = 'APPLE';
ERROR:  new row for relation "fruits_in_stock" violates check constraint "fruits_in_stock_check"
DETAIL:  Failing row contains (APPLE, 100, 115).

More interestingly, you also can't reserve more than you have, even though the constraints are on another table:

postgres=# UPDATE fruit_offer SET offered_amount = 1100 WHERE offer_id = 1;
ERROR:  new row for relation "fruits_in_stock" violates check constraint "fruits_in_stock_check"
DETAIL:  Failing row contains (APPLE, 500, 1100).
CONTEXT:  SQL statement "UPDATE fruits_in_stock
       SET reserved = reserved - OLD.offered_amount
                                     + NEW.offered_amount
     WHERE name = NEW.fruit_name"
PL/pgSQL function reserve_stock_on_offer() line 8 at SQL statement

When you finally delete the offer, the reservation is released:

postgres=# DELETE FROM fruit_offer WHERE offer_id = 1;
DELETE 1
postgres=# SELECT * FROM fruits_in_stock;
-[ RECORD 1 ]----
name     | ORANGE
in_stock | 500
reserved | 0
-[ RECORD 2 ]----
name     | APPLE
in_stock | 500
reserved | 0

In a real system, you probably will archive the old offer before deleting it.

Auditing changes

If you need to know who did what to the data and when it was done, one way to find out is to log every action that is performed in an important table. In PostgreSQL 9.3, you can also audit the data definition language (DDL) changes to the database using event triggers. We will learn more about this in the later chapters.

There are at least two equally valid ways to perform data auditing:

Using auditing triggers
Allowing tables to be accessed only through functions and auditing inside these functions

Here, we will take a look at a minimal number of examples for both the approaches.

First, let's create the tables:

CREATE TABLE salaries(
    emp_name text PRIMARY KEY,
    salary integer NOT NULL
);

CREATE TABLE salary_change_log(
    changed_by text DEFAULT CURRENT_USER,
    changed_at timestamp DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
    salary_op text,
    emp_name text,
    old_salary integer,
    new_salary integer
);
REVOKE ALL ON salary_change_log FROM PUBLIC;
GRANT ALL ON salary_change_log TO managers;

You don't generally want your users to be able to change audit logs, so only grant the managers the right to access these. If you plan to let users access the salary table directly, you should put a trigger on it for auditing:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION log_salary_change () RETURNS trigger AS $$
    BEGIN
        IF TG_OP = 'INSERT' THEN
      INSERT INTO salary_change_log(salary_op,emp_name,new_salary)
     VALUES (TG_OP,NEW.emp_name,NEW.salary);
  ELSIF TG_OP = 'UPDATE' THEN        
INSERT INTO salary_change_log(salary_op,emp_name,old_salary,new_salary)
      VALUES (TG_OP,NEW.emp_name,OLD.salary,NEW.salary);
  ELSIF TG_OP = 'DELETE' THEN
      INSERT INTO salary_change_log(salary_op,emp_name,old_salary)
      VALUES (TG_OP,NEW.emp_name,OLD.salary);
        END IF;
        RETURN NEW;
    END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql SECURITY DEFINER;

CREATE TRIGGER audit_salary_change
AFTER INSERT OR UPDATE OR DELETE ON salaries
    FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE log_salary_change ();

Now, let's test out some salary management:

postgres=# INSERT INTO salaries values('Bob',1000);
INSERT 0 1
postgres=# UPDATE salaries SET salary = 1100 WHERE emp_name = 'Bob';
UPDATE 1
postgres=# INSERT INTO salaries VALUES('Mary',1000);
INSERT 0 1
postgres=# UPDATE salaries SET salary = salary + 200;
UPDATE 2
postgres=# SELECT * FROM salaries;
-[ RECORD 1 ]--
emp_name | Bob
salary   | 1300
-[ RECORD 2 ]--
emp_name | Mary
salary   | 1200

Each one of these changes is saved into the salary change log table for auditing purposes:

postgres=# SELECT * FROM salary_change_log;
-[ RECORD 1 ]--------------------------
changed_by | frank
changed_at | 2012-01-25 15:44:43.311299
salary_op  | INSERT
emp_name   | Bob
old_salary | 
new_salary | 1000
-[ RECORD 2 ]--------------------------
changed_by | frank
changed_at | 2012-01-25 15:44:43.313405
salary_op  | UPDATE
emp_name   | Bob
old_salary | 1000
new_salary | 1100
-[ RECORD 3 ]--------------------------
changed_by | frank
changed_at | 2012-01-25 15:44:43.314208
salary_op  | INSERT
emp_name   | Mary
old_salary | 
new_salary | 1000
-[ RECORD 4 ]--------------------------
changed_by | frank
changed_at | 2012-01-25 15:44:43.314903
salary_op  | UPDATE
emp_name   | Bob
old_salary | 1100
new_salary | 1300
-[ RECORD 5 ]--------------------------
changed_by | frank
changed_at | 2012-01-25 15:44:43.314903
salary_op  | UPDATE
emp_name   | Mary
old_salary | 1000
new_salary | 1200

On the other hand, you may not want anybody to have direct access to the salary table, in which case you can perform the REVOKE command. The following command will revoke all privileges from PUBLIC:

REVOKE ALL ON salaries FROM PUBLIC;

Also, give users access to only two functions: the first function is for any user taking a look at salaries and the other function can be used to change salaries, which is available only to managers.

The functions will have all the access to the underlying tables because they are declared as SECURITY DEFINER, which means that they run with the privileges of the user who created them.

This is how the salary lookup function will look:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION get_salary(text)
RETURNS integer
AS $$
    -- if you look at other people's salaries, it gets logged
    INSERT INTO salary_change_log(salary_op,emp_name,new_salary)
    SELECT 'SELECT',emp_name,salary
      FROM salaries
     WHERE upper(emp_name) = upper($1)
       AND upper(emp_name) != upper(CURRENT_USER);
    -- don't log select of own salary
    -- return the requested salary
    SELECT salary FROM salaries WHERE upper(emp_name) = upper($1);
$$ LANGUAGE SQL SECURITY DEFINER;

Notice that we implemented a soft-security approach, where you can look up other people's salaries, but you have to do it responsibly, that is, only when you need to, as your manager will know that you have checked.

The set_salary() function abstracts away the need to check whether the user exists; if the user does not exist, it is created. Setting someone's salary to 0 will remove him or her from the salary table. Thus, the interface is simplified to a large extent, and the client application of these functions needs to know, and do, less:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION set_salary(i_emp_name text, i_salary int)
RETURNS TEXT AS $$
DECLARE
    old_salary integer;
BEGIN
    SELECT salary INTO old_salary
      FROM salaries
     WHERE upper(emp_name) = upper(i_emp_name);
    IF NOT FOUND THEN
        INSERT INTO salaries VALUES(i_emp_name, i_salary);
  INSERT INTO salary_change_log(salary_op,emp_name,new_salary)
      VALUES ('INSERT',i_emp_name,i_salary);
        RETURN 'INSERTED USER ' || i_emp_name;
    ELSIF i_salary > 0 THEN
        UPDATE salaries
     SET salary = i_salary
   WHERE upper(emp_name) = upper(i_emp_name);
  INSERT INTO salary_change_log
                 (salary_op,emp_name,old_salary,new_salary)
      VALUES ('UPDATE',i_emp_name,old_salary,i_salary);
        RETURN 'UPDATED USER ' || i_emp_name;
    ELSE -- salary set to 0
        DELETE FROM salaries WHERE upper(emp_name) = upper(i_emp_name);
  INSERT INTO salary_change_log(salary_op,emp_name,old_salary)
      VALUES ('DELETE',i_emp_name,old_salary);
        RETURN 'DELETED USER ' || i_emp_name;
    END IF;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql SECURITY DEFINER;

Now, drop the audit trigger (otherwise the changes will be logged twice) and test the new functionality:

postgres=# DROP TRIGGER audit_salary_change ON salaries;
DROP TRIGGER
postgres=# 
postgres=# SELECT set_salary('Fred',750);
-[ RECORD 1 ]------------------
set_salary | INSERTED USER Fred

postgres=# SELECT set_salary('frank',100);
-[ RECORD 1 ]-------------------
set_salary | INSERTED USER frank

postgres=# SELECT * FROM salaries ;
-[ RECORD 1 ]---
emp_name | Bob
salary   | 1300
-[ RECORD 2 ]---
emp_name | Mary
salary   | 1200
-[ RECORD 3 ]---
emp_name | Fred
salary   | 750
-[ RECORD 4 ]---
emp_name | frank
salary   | 100

postgres=# SELECT set_salary('mary',0);
-[ RECORD 1 ]-----------------
set_salary | DELETED USER mary

postgres=# SELECT * FROM salaries ;
-[ RECORD 1 ]---
emp_name | Bob
salary   | 1300
-[ RECORD 2 ]---
emp_name | Fred
salary   | 750
-[ RECORD 3 ]---
emp_name | frank
salary   | 100

postgres=# SELECT * FROM salary_change_log ;
...
-[ RECORD 6 ]--------------------------
changed_by | gsmith
changed_at | 2013-01-25 15:57:49.057592
salary_op  | INSERT
emp_name   | Fred
old_salary | 
new_salary | 750
-[ RECORD 7 ]--------------------------
changed_by | gsmith
changed_at | 2013-01-25 15:57:49.062456
salary_op  | INSERT
emp_name   | frank
old_salary | 
new_salary | 100
-[ RECORD 8 ]--------------------------
changed_by | gsmith
changed_at | 2013-01-25 15:57:49.064337
salary_op  | DELETE
emp_name   | mary
old_salary | 1200
new_salary |

Programming best practices

Developing application software is complicated. Some of the approaches that help manage this complexity are so popular that they have been given simple acronyms that can be remembered. Next, we'll introduce some of these principles and show you 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 3 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 can rewrite parts of it later for various reasons such as speed, code compactness, to show off how clever you are, and so on. However, always write the code in a simple way first, so that you can be absolutely sure that it does what you want. Not only do you get working on the code quickly, but you also have something to compare to when you try more advanced ways to do the same thing.

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 the code written as functions, but the speed may be sufficient for your needs. If more speed is required, 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 most of the time, 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 principle means you should implement any piece of business logic just once and put the code for doing it in the right place.

This may be hard sometimes; for example, you want to do some checks on your web forms in the browser, but still do the final checks in the database. However, 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 need to do this thing to a customer's table, they just call:

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

That's it!

If the logic behind the function needs to be changed, 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 the 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 how the final database will look 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 a minimal implementation that satisfies the current specifications, but do it with extensibility in mind. It is very easy to "paint yourself into a corner" when implementing a big specification 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 performs 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 will be from enterprise software people trying to sell you a complex set of SOAP services. But the essence of SOA is to organize your software platform as a set of services that clients, and other services, call in order to perform certain well-defined atomic tasks, as follows:

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 a 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, as well as a complex management infrastructure. They can also be a set of PostgreSQL functions, taking a set of arguments and returning a set of values. If the arguments or return values are complex, they can be passed as XML or JSON, but a simple set of standard PostgreSQL data types is often enough. In Chapter 10, Scaling Your Database with PL/Proxy, you will learn how to make such a 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 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, and new full-fledged types too.

For example, a Dutch company, MGRID, has developed a value with unit set of data types, so that you can divide 10 km by 0.2 hours 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 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 an error can be high—the difference between 10 ml and 10 cc can be vital. However, using a similar system might also have averted many other disasters, where wrong units ended up producing bad computation results. If the amount is always accompanied by the unit, the possibility for these kinds of errors is diminished. You can also add your own index method 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 that are developed outside the core.

The latest index method that became officially included in PostgreSQL is k nearest neighbor (KNN)—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 to rank full-text search results by how well they match the search terms. Before KNN, this kind of thing was done by querying all the rows which matched even slightly, then sorting all these by the distance function, and returning K top rows as the final step.

If done using the KNN index, the index access can start returning the rows in the desired order; so, a simple LIMIT K function will return 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 saw, index types are different from the data types they index. Another example, is the same General Inverted Index (GIN) can be used for full-text searches (together with stemmers, thesauri, and other text-processing stuff), as well as for indexing elements of integer arrays.

Wrapping up – why program in the server?

The main advantages of doing most data manipulation code on the server-side are stated in the following sections.

Performance

Doing the computation near the data is almost always a performance win, as the latencies to get the data are minimal. In a typical data-intensive computation, most of the time is spent in getting the data. Therefore, making data access inside the computation faster is the best way to make the whole thing fast. On my laptop, it takes 2.2 ms to query one random row from a 1,000,000-row database into the client, but it takes only 0.12 ms to get the data inside the database. This is 20 times faster and inside the same machine over Unix sockets. The difference can be bigger if there is a network connection between the client and the server.

A small real-word story:

A friend of mine was called to help a large company (I'm sure all of you know it, but I can't tell you which one) in order to make its e-mail sending application faster. They had implemented their e-mail generation system with all the latest Java EE technologies: first, getting the data from the database, passing the data around between services, and serializing and deserializing it several times before finally doing XSLT transformation on the data to produce the e-mail text. The end result being that it produced only a few hundred e-mails per second, and they were falling behind with their responses.

When he rewrote the process to use a PL/Perl function inside the database to format the data and the query returned already fully-formatted e-mails, it suddenly started spewing out tens of thousands of e-mails per second and they had to add a second copy of the sent mail to actually be able to send them out.

Ease of maintenance

If all the data manipulation code is in a database, either as database functions or views, the actual upgrade process becomes very easy. All that is needed is to run a DDL script that redefines the functions; all the clients automatically use the new code with no downtime and no complicated coordination between several frontend systems and teams.

Improved productivity

Server-side functions are perhaps the best way to achieve code reuse. Any client application written in any language or framework can make use of the server-side functions, ensuring maximum reuse in all environments.

Simple ways to tighten security

If all the access for some possibly insecure servers goes through functions, the database user of these servers can only be granted access to the needed functions and nothing else. They can't see the table data or even the fact that these tables exist. So, even if the server is compromised, all it can do is continue to call the same functions. Also, there is no possibility of stealing passwords, e-mails, or other sensitive information by issuing its own queries such as SELECT * FROM users; and getting all the data there is in the database.

Also, the most important thing is that programming in a server is fun!

Filter reviews by

All

Amazon verified reviews

CP Jun 08, 2015

This is an excellent book for anyone looking to explore PostgreSQL with an Oracle background. PostgreSQL, like Oracle, supports robust database programming. If you are a PL/SQL developer and are looking to explore what PostgreSQL has to offer for a developer, this is the book for you. There aren't too many books available for PostgreSQL programming, but this book does a great job exploring most of the avenues of PostgreSQL programming. The major difference between Oracle and PostgreSQL is the variety of languages available to program, which include Python and PostgreSQL's version of PL/SQL - PLpgSQL.This book is also written in a way that should be understandable to most programmers that haven't programmed in the database before. It covers a wide range of topics, including installing and setting up pgAdminIII and debugging your server-side programs.

Amazon Verified review

WiltDurkey Oct 06, 2016

Well, first what do I mean by server-side? Mostly, anything that is not just admin work that is carried out through execution on the server, rather than by standard insert/update/delete/select SQL. It also does not include DDL.Which leaves you mostly with triggers and stored procedures, as well as some other things like sharding.Why do you care? Could you not find this info on the internet?Well, yes, you could. You could also spend hours tracking it down, between the different versions of postgres as well as reading posts by people who sometimes have a shaky grasp of how postgres operates. Basically, there is a lot of dross out there. And postgres is different, and sometimes more sophisticated than Oracle or SQL Server's procedural languages.In any case, while I could find a few tidbits with examples here and there, nothing was comprehensive. The bulk of reliable info is really on the postgres docs themselves. Which are good, but intended as a reference, not an introduction to its subject.On the other hand, I was able to quickly read this book, get a general idea of what postgres was capable of doing, and put that right into practice replacing some complicated and slow client-side SELECTs with a much tighter, faster and easier to understand and test postgres stored procedure.That's because this book is both good at explaining, written by someone who really knows his subject and covers most of the basic knowledge you need to get started.As a bonus, I was also able to quickly grasp what is meant by Python-based stored procedures. Not sure I have much use for them, despite using Python extensively on the client side, but now I know where to go if I need to.

Alessandro Rossi Nov 22, 2017

Libro scritto bene ed in maniera chiara,ci sono ottimi esempi che aiutano a capire ODBMS Postrgresql. Avendo già lavorato con Oracle è stato un utile introduzione che mi ha permesso di capire le differenze ed essere autosufficiente in breve tempo. A mio avviso consigliato anche per chi ha poche conoscenze di DB.

KingDragonfly Aug 08, 2019

As a DBA for many years, I don't agree with everything. For example while valid, I hate triggers because they can become extremely painful and confusing when things needs to be fixed. Also he makes a valid point about server-side versus client-side processing, however it's a little dated; the trend is to write horribly slow abstracted client side database processing, and throw more cloud based hardware at it when it performs badly. Love it or hate it: it's the Enterprise reality. My only complaint is audience is oriented to small shops / small businesses / simple clients.

KS Jun 26, 2020

PostgreSQL のユーザ定義関数を種々の言語で書くためのレシピ集といったところでしょうか。正式なドキュメントやネット上のノウハウの隙間を埋めてくれるような内容で、助かります。C 言語の書き方はいろいろとノウハウがあるのですが、書ききれない部分もありました。特に、PostgreSQL コア機能を使うためのノウハウなどがあるといいのですが、SPIの簡単な記述があるだけだったのが残念。

PostgreSQL Server Programming - Second Edition: Extend PostgreSQL using PostgreSQL server programming to create, test, debug, and optimize a range of user-defined functions in your favorite programming language , Second Edition

What do you get with Print?

Contact Details

Shipping Address

Billing Address

Using PL/pgSQL for integrity checks

Description

Who is this book for?

What you will learn

Product Details

What do you get with Print?

Contact Details

Shipping Address

Billing Address

Product Details

Packt Subscriptions

Frequently bought together

Table of Contents

Recommendations for you

Customer reviews

Filter reviews by

People who bought this also bought

About the 3 authors

FAQs