A James Lewis writes:
> Before I go investigating this, is it possible to trigger an arbitrary
> program from the SQL, say a shell script?
At the lowest level, you can generally do anything a C program can do.
Writing the equivalent of system() in SQL should be rather trivial.
You can also take a look at my little toy project PL/sh:
http://www.postgresql.org/~petere/plsh.html
--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net http://yi.org/peter-e/