37 Articles tagged “Extensions”

After reading Simon’s blog post, I can’t help but try to give some details about what it is exactly that I’m working on. As he said, there are several aspects to extensions in PostgreSQL, it all begins here: Chapter 35. Extending SQL. It’s possible, and mostly simple enough, to add your own code or behavior to PostgreSQL, so that it will use your code and your semantics while solving user queries.

These days, thanks to my community oriented job, I’m working full time on a PostgreSQL patch to terminate basic support for extending SQL. First thing I want to share is that patching the backend code is not as hard as one would think. Second one is that git really is helping. “Not as hard as one would think, are you kidding me?”, I hear some say. Well, that’s true. It’s C code in there, but with a very good layer of abstractions so that you’re not dealing with subtle problems that much.

Yeah I’m back on working on my part of the extension thing in PostgreSQL. First step is a little one, but as it has public consequences, I figured I’d talk about it already. I’ve just refreshed my git repository to follow the new master one, and you can see that here http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb?p=postgresql-extension.git;a=commitdiff;h=9a88e9de246218e93c04b6b97e1ef61d97925430. It’s been easier than I feared, mainly: $ git --no-pager diff master..extension $ git --no-pager format-patch master..extension $ cp 0001-First-stab-at-writing-pg_execute_from_file-function.

It’s been a week since the last commits in the el-get repository, and those were all about fixing and adding recipes, and about notifications. Nothing like core plumbing you see. Also, 0.9 was released on 2010-08-24 and felt pretty complete already, then received lots of improvements. It’s high time to cross the line and call it 1.0! Now existing users will certainly just be moderatly happy to see the tool reach that version number, depending whether they think more about the bugs they want to see fixed (ftp is supported, only called http) and the new features they want to see in ( info documentation) or more about what el-get does for them already today…

In trying to help an extension debian packaging effort, I’ve once again proposed to handle it. That’s because I now begin to know how to do it, as you can see in my package overview page at debian QA facility. There’s a reason why I proposed myself here, it’s that yet another tool of mine is now to be found in debian, and should greatly help extension packaging there. You can already check for the postgresql-server-dev-all package page if you’re that impatient!