On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 12:06:47PM +0100, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote: > On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 01:10:21AM -0000, Ben Trewern wrote: > > I know I should be writing these in C but that's a bit beyond me. I was > > going to try PL/Python or PL/Perl or even PL/Ruby. Has anyone any idea > > which language is fastest, or is the data access going to swamp the overhead > > of small functions? > > I'm not sure if it's what you ask for, but there _is_ a clear difference > between the procedural languages -- I've had a 10x speed increase from > rewriting PL/PgSQL stuff into PL/Perl, for instance. The difference is clear only in specific cases; just because you saw a 10x increase in some cases doesn't mean you can expect that kind of increase, or indeed any increase, in others. I've seen PL/pgSQL beat all other PL/* challengers handily many times, especially when the function does a lot of querying and looping through large result sets. I tend to use PL/pgSQL except in cases where PL/pgSQL can't do what I want or the job would be much easier in another language (e.g., string manipulation, for which I'd use PL/Perl or PL/Ruby). Even then I might use the other language only to write small functions that a PL/pgSQL function could call. As Merlin suggested, maybe Ben could tell us what he wants to do that he thinks should be written in C or a language other than PL/pgSQL. Without knowing what problem is to be solved it's near impossible to recommend an appropriate tool. -- Michael Fuhr
