On 8/8/06, Jeffrey Bigham <jbigham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Not really. Basically I know C decently enough and would have to learn PL/pgSQL (although it looks pretty easy). Perl sounds quite attractive for the added benefit of text-processing as you mention. I also have some vague understanding that C might be faster. I hope I'm not opening a can-of-worms, but is C actually faster?
IMO, pl/pgsql should be the first sp language you learn and the primary language of development for strored procedures. It is simply better than most other pl languages for data processing and ease of maitenance. There are two reasons why you might want to use C: one is that you might want to interface with a C library and make it callable from SQL. You should check out Magnus Hagander's integration of OpenLDAP for a good example of this (check his blog). Note that Magnus who is in my opinion an expert C programmer only did this after trying ther perl implementation and finding it unworkable. another reason to use C is to expose some database internals. for example, in C you can invoke a function by it's oid which is currently impossible to do in sql/plpgsql without some serious acrobatics. Aside from that, I would avoid. One of the reasons databases were invented was so we don't have to use C for data processing (or COBOL, etc.), or at least not until the hard work has already been done. merlin
