Re: functions and creating

On Thu, Aug 03, 2006 at 09:08:02PM +0200, Alex du Plessis wrote:
> I need to create new databases on demand from my app. Due to system
> constraints I cannot create the database from the app itself and was
> thinking of using a pl/psql function within the master database to
> perform this duty.
>
> However, it seems I cannot supply the name of the new database to the
> function via a function parameter. Is there a way to do this and am
> just being ignorant?. Does anybody know how to get around this one?

In some cases like this you can use PL/pgSQL's EXECUTE statement
to execute a dynamically-created statement; unfortunately this isn't
one of those cases because you can't execute CREATE DATABASE from
within a function. If you try you'll get the following error:

ERROR: CREATE DATABASE cannot be executed from a function

One way for a function to execute forbidden commands is for the
function to use contrib/dblink to connect to the database and execute
the commands over that connection.

--
Michael Fuhr