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Schedule - PGConf.EU 2019

Implementing your first Postgres extension: from coding to distribution

Date: 2019-10-15
Time: 13:30–17:00
Room: Monti
Level: Intermediate

One of the strongest features of any database is its extensibility and PostgreSQL comes with a rich extension API. It allows you to define new functions, types, and operators. It even allows you to modify some of its core parts like planner, executor or storage engine. You read it right, you can even change the behavior of PostgreSQL planner. How cool is that?

Such freedom in extensibility created strong extension community around PostgreSQL and made way for a vast amount of extensions such as pg_stat_statements, citus, postgresql-hll and many more.

In this tutorial, we will look at how you can create your own PostgreSQL extension. We will start with more common stuff like defining new functions and types but gradually explore less known parts of the PostgreSQL's extension API like C level hooks which lets you change the behavior of planner, executor and other core parts of the PostgreSQL. We will see how to code, debug, compile and test our extension. After that, we will also look into how to package and distribute our extension for other people to use.

To get the best benefit from the tutorial, C and SQL knowledge would be beneficial. Some knowledge on PostgreSQL internals would also be useful but we will cover the necessary details, so it is not necessary.

Slides

The following slides have been made available for this session:

Speaker

Burak Yucesoy
Onder Kalaci