I want your opinion on how to do something.

Basically, I have several production databases with various data, and I have a reports database that grabs all necessary data once a day.

Now, there is is a new requirement to have some of the data available in the reports database as soon as it is inserted in the production database. Specifically, the data in question is in two particular tables. However, in addition to just shipping the tables in, I also need to perform a bit of processing on the data as it comes. Basically, each transaction in production is represented by 1-3 rows in the two tables. One of the fields contains urlencoded data, which I need to decode and concatenate, so that the rows are represented by one row in another table.

E.g.

Table A brought from production:
key field 1 | key field 2 | num of segments | segment num | segment id |
------------+-------------+-----------------+-------------+------------|
abcde | 134 | 3 | 1 | 999000 |
abcde | 567 | 3 | 3 | 999000 |
abcde | 890 | 3 | 2 | 999000 |
fghij | 987 | 2 | 1 | 999001 |
fghij | 654 | 2 | 2 | 999001 |
abcde | -11 | 1 | 1 | 999003 |

Table B from production

key field 1 | key field 2 | urlencoded data |
------------+-------------+-----------------+
abcde | 134 | AAA |
abcde | 567 | CCC |
abcde | 890 | BBB |
fghij | 987 | fff |
fghij | 654 | ggg |
abcde | -11 | XXX |

Here we have basically three transactions - one with three segments, one with two, and one with a single segment. The data that identifies that certain rows belong to the same transation and what the order is is in table A. The actual data to decode is in table B.

The result I need to produce is a new table like this:

key field 1 | key field 2 | segment id | decoded concatenated data|
------------+-------------+------------+--------------------------|
abcde | 134 | 999000 | AAABBBCCC |
fghij | 987 | 999001 | fffggg |
abcde | -11 | 999003 | XXX |

Basically, a single row for each transaction, with the key fields taken from the original's first segment, and the data decoded and concatenated. But I need this to be done in (near) real-time - as the rows are added. Because of the decoding and concatenation requirements, this can't be a view, because there is no SQL function that will do the required processing, and I'm not sure a view would be efficient for running reports anyway. So a new table it will be.

Basically, I can replicate these two tables from production to the reports database using Londiste, which allows me to replicate single tables and is also supposed to allow me to run triggers on the tables.

What I thought of doing was create a trigger on one of the tables, such that when data is inserted, it will insert data into the "result" table, and write this trigger using PL/Perl or PL/Python which I'm guessing will allow me to do the string manipulation required.

The issue is that when an insert or an update is fired, I can't say whether all the segments of the same transaction have been written yet, and if only some of them were written, there is no guarantee on the order in which they are written. The question is whether such a trigger can be created at all. It needs to verify that all parts are in the database - run a query on the same table at the time the trigger is running. If not all data is there, it shouldn't insert anything. Is this feasible at all? How would you achieve it?

Thank you,
Herouth