Newbie questions, diff between functions and procedures; & why cube functions?

pgAdmin III is quite a nice tool but one thing I can't figure out is what the
difference is between what pgAdmin calls a function and what it calls a
procedure. They have almost the same properties in the edit dialog (but not
quite). I've looked in the postgres and pgAdmin help docs and there seems to
be no trace of discussion on this issue, which seems strange. I have a book
called Beginning Databases with PostgeSQL which in general is very good, but
has the same issue. There is a chapter called 'functions, stored procedures,
and triggers', which makes zero distinction in the text of the chapter
between functions and procs, uses the terms interchangeably...end result is
this topic is utterly unfathomable for a postgres newbie. I'm used to SQL
Server which has user defined functions and stored procedures.

I ask here re this issue because some other pg interfaces don't offer the
distinction between functions and procs. For instance navicat just has
functions.

Not sure this is a pgAdmin question either but why does pg seem to create a
mass of cube and g_cube functions for each new db? They sure clutter up the
place, but maybe they are needed by postgres?

Another
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Newbie-questions%2C-diff-between-functions-and-procedures----why-cube-functions--tf2689810.html#a7500795
Sent from the PostgreSQL - pgadmin support mailing list archive at Nabble.com.