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.
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!
The modern calendar is a trap for the young engineer’s mind. We deal with the calendar on a daily basis and until exposed to its insanity it’s rather common to think that calendar based computations are easy. That’s until you’ve tried to do it once. A very good read about how the current calendar came to be the way it is now is Erik’s Naggum The Long, Painful History of Time.
Business logic is supposed to be the part of the application where you deal with customer or user facing decisions and computations. It is often argued that this part should be well separated from the rest of the technical infrastructure of your code. Of course, SQL and relational database design is meant to support your business cases (or user stories), so then we can ask ourselves if SQL should be part of your business logic implementation. Or actually, how much of your business logic should be SQL?
