PostgreSQL 10 is now available for everyone to use, and hinted by David Fetter I had to review my previous article on Json and SQL to adapt to Set Returning Functions changes.

A Set Returning Function is a PostgreSQL Stored Procedure that can be used as a relation: from a single call it returns an entire result set, much like a subquery or a table.

It used to be possible to use SRF in the SELECT clause, with dubious (but useful at times) semantics, and also in scalar contexts. The semantics have been fixed and are now much clearer, and the uses in scalar contexts are forbidden — they were a hack and never made sense anyway.

Mastering PostgreSQL in Application Development is the full title of the book I am currently writing. Running the PostgreSQL is YeSQL series of blog posts has shown me developers need a PostgreSQL book for developers. A book with the same properties as the YeSQL series articles in this blog: we use real world data sets to put every query and SQL technique we learn in the context of a user story or business case,

There’s a very rich set of PostgreSQL functions to process text, you can find them all at the String Functions and Operators documentation chapter, with functions such as overlay, substring, position or trim. Or aggregates such as string_agg. And then regular expression functions, including the very powerful regexp_split_to_table.

In a previous article here we saw How to Write SQL in your application code. The main idea in that article is to maintain your queries in separate SQL files, where it’s easier to maintain them. In particular if you want to be able to test them again in production, and when you have to work and rewrite queries.

Today pgloader v3.4.1 is released and available! This new release comes with 110 commits as show in github compare view.

This release of pgloader is following the tradition of simplifying things for users, or if you allow me to quote Alan Kay, I believe that if simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

The reason why I like Unicode a lot is because it allows me to code in text based environments and still have nice output. Today, we’re going to play with Regional Indicator Symbol, which is implemented as a Unicode combinaison of letters from 🇦 to 🇿. For instance, if you display 🇫 then 🇷 concatenated together, you get 🇫🇷. Let’s try that from our PostgreSQL prompt!