Re: Wishlist of PL/Perl Enhancements for PostgreSQL 8.5

On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 09:57:39AM +0100, Tim Bunce wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 11:25:18PM +0100, Tim Bunce wrote:
> > I'm planning to work with Andrew Dunstan on some enhancements to PL/Perl
> > for PostgreSQL 8.5.
> >
> > I've written up some initial proposals here:
> >
> > http://blog.timbunce.org/2009/10/05/wishlist-of-plperl-enhancements-for-postgresql-8-5/
> >
> > I'd welcome any feedback on those, and any other suggestions you may have.
> > (Either here, on the blog, or direct to me - I'll post a summary.)
>
> I've posted the bulk of the text (including some minor updates) below
> to make commenting here easier.
>
> Tim.
>
> Goals:
>
> - Enable modular programming by pre-loading user libraries.
> - Soften the hard choice between plperl and plperlu, so there’s less reason to “give up” and use plperlu.
> - Improve performance.
> - Improve flexibility for future changes.
> - Enable use of tracing/debugging tools.
>
> Specific Proposals:
>
> * Enable configuration of perl at initialization
>
> Add ability to specify in postgresql.conf some code to be run when a
> perl interpreter is initialized. For example:
>
> plperl.at_init_do = 'use lib qw(/path/to/mylib); use MyPlPerlUtils; use List::Util qw(sum);'

Would there be some way to integrate this with the per-ROLE,
per-database GUC infrastructure?

> For a PL/Perl function called “foo”, a minimal implementation would use
> a name like “foo__id54321″ where 54321 is the oid of the function. This
> avoids having to deal with polymorphic functions (where multiple
> functions have the same name but different arguments).
>
> The names won’t enable inter-function calling

Inter-function calling could be handy, too.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
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