[Please copy the mailing list on replies so others can participate in and learn from the discussion.] On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 11:39:03AM -0400, Jasbinder Bali wrote: > Well, as in normal Sql server or oracle Stored procedures, you write a > procedure in the database server and some middle tier would invoke it. > Now here what is the concept of server side or client side function in > postres if i just have to create a function in C and then would like my > Stored procedure to invoke it. Also all the DB related activities like > select, delete, update should be taken care of by the C function itself. It sounds like you want to write a server-side function that a client application or another server-side function could invoke with SELECT do_stuff() (or PERFORM do_stuff() in PL/pgSQL). You can do that in C, but unless you need the kind of low-level functionality that only C can provide then you'd probably be better off using a higher level server-side language like PL/pgSQL, PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Tcl, PL/Ruby, PL/Java, PL/R, etc. Functions in PostgreSQL aren't the same as stored procedures in some other DBMSs. For example, a function can't start or end a transaction since it's already being executed in the context of a transaction, although in 8.0 and later a function can do partial rollbacks via exception handling. However, a function could connect to the database via dblink, Perl DBI, etc., and then do anything that an ordinary client could do. -- Michael Fuhr
