Choosing an Application Environment

   

When you choose an environment for your code, there are a number of issues to consider. To start with, you have to decide whether the feature that you want to build should be server-side code, client-side code, or a combination of both.

Server-Side Code

There are several advantages to adding functionality as server-side code.

The first consideration is performance. If you are creating an application that needs to access many rows of data, it will execute faster on the server. You won't have to send the data across the network to the client (network traffic is very expensive in terms of performance).

Next, you should consider code reuse. If you add a feature in the form of a server-side function, that feature can be used by any client application. You can also use server-side functions within SQL queries.

Another advantage to creating server-side functions is that you can use a server function as a trigger. A trigger function is executed whenever a particular condition occurs. For example, you can define a trigger that executes whenever a row is deleted from a particular table.

Finally, server-side code is portable. Any function that you write in a server-side procedural language runs on any platform that supports PostgreSQL. Of course, if you write a server-side function that requires specific server-side features (such as other functions or data types), those features must be installed in each server.

Client-Side Code

Client-side code is useful for building the user interface. You can't build a user interface using one of the server-side procedural languages ”they execute within the context of the server and the server has no user interface.

One of the interesting things to note about the client APIs is that most of them are implemented using the libpq API (ODBC and JDBC are not). This means, for example, that if you are using libpq++ from a C++ application and you call a member function of the PgDatabase class, it will be translated into one or more calls to the libpq library.

The ODBC and JDBC interfaces are not implemented using libpq . Instead, they talk directly to the backend database using the same network protocol as libpq . If you ever decide to implement your own client API, you can choose either method: implement your API in terms of libpq (or one of the other APIs), or talk directly to the server using the same underlying network protocol.

Mixing Server-Side and Client-Side Code

A particularly powerful strategy is to create an application using a mixture of client-side code and stored-procedures. Many commercial applications are shipped with two types of code. When you use one of these packages, you install a set of stored-procedures into the database; then you install external client applications that make use of the custom procedures.

This arrangement gives you all the advantages of server-side code (performance, portability, and reusability) plus the capability to create a pleasant user interface in the client.

   


PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672327562
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 220
Authors: Korry Douglas

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