Postgres OnLine Journal - plcoffee

PostgreSQL 9.3 extension treats for windows users: plV8

nospam@example.com (Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:09:00 -0400

Now that PostgreSQL 9.3 beta1 has been released we've started to jump start our experimentation by compiling our favorite extensions. First on the list is PL/V8 js.

This was compiled against 9.3beta1 for 64-bit and 32-bit and plv8 version 1.4.0. We briefly tried with the EDB windows builds which we downloaded from: http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/pgbindownload and seems to work fine.

We hope windows users find these useful.

PLV8 1.3 windows binaries for PostgreSQL 9.2

nospam@example.com (Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:32:00 -0500

As Hitoshi Hirada mentioned already in PL/v8 is now the richest procedural language , PL/V8 1.3 has been recently released and some of the great new features are automatic conversion of json objects, and ability to write window functions. Not only does PL/V8 allow you to make the most of the native JSON support in PostgreSQL 9.2, but in many cases particularly numeric processing, the speed is much better than what you get with plpgsql. Someone asked us a while back about this and we are hoping to do a demonstration of pl/v8 for numeric processing where you can see the marked difference in speed and perhaps compare with something like PL/R that is also often used for array numeric processing.

For those who are on windows we've compiled PLv8 1.3 for windows 32-bit and windows 64-bit that work with PostgreSQL EDB installs. We haven't had a chance to thoroughly test them yet, so let us know if you find issues. We've saved the last versions we compiled under a different name since some things are not backward compatible between the PLv8 1.1 and 1.3 releases.

We are also hoping to making our windows binary download links more visible. For stop gap fix, we are tagging all the articles concerning things like FDW extensions, PostGIS, plv8 we've compiled for windows under winextensions and accessible from http://www.postgresonline.com/winextensions.php

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Windows Binaries and Installers Up for PostgreSQL 9.2: PLV8 and PostGIS 2.0.1

nospam@example.com (Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 16:24:01 -0400

We've recompiled our PL/V8 for windows against PostgreSQL 9.2.0 (both 32-bit and 64-bit) with latest PL/V8 code. This includes the additional LiveScript language, which you can use by doing:

CREATE EXTENSION plls;

New release also includes some bug fixes such as Crash case with non-array in array returning function.

We have also put up binaries and installers for PostGIS 2.0.1 for PostgreSQL 9.2 (32-bit and 64-bit) downloadable from PostGIS website. We haven't deployed the installers to Application StackBuilder yet since we are doing some testing before we release to the masses.

PLV8JS and PLCoffee Part 2: JSON search requests

nospam@example.com (Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 01:35:00 -0400

PostgreSQL 9.2 beta3 got released this week and so we inch ever closer to final in another 2 months or so. One of the great new features is the built-in JSON type and companion PLV8/PLCoffee languages that allow for easy processing of JSON objects. One of the use cases we had in mind is to take as input a JSON search request that in turn returns a JSON dataset.

We'll use our table from PLV8 and PLCoffee Upserting. Keep in mind that in practice the json search request would be generated by a client side javascript API such as our favorite JQuery, but for quick prototyping, we'll generate the request in the database with some SQL.

If you are on windows and don't have plv8 available we have PostgreSQL 9.2 64-bit and 32-bit plv8/plcoffee experimental binaries and instructions. We haven't recompiled against 9.2beta3, but our existing binaries seem to work fine on our beta3 install.

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PLV8JS and PLCoffee Part 1: Upserting

nospam@example.com (Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 13:13:00 -0400

Today's modern web application workflow in its simplest form looks something like this:

Get dataset as JSON object usually using yet another JSON query object to pass the request using a javascript framework like JQuery/ExtJS/OpenLayers/Leaflet etc.
Make changes to JSON dataset object and send back to the web server.
On webserver unravel the JSON object and save to respective database tables. This part is really yucky as it often involves the web application server side language doing the unraveling and then yet another step of setting up stored procedures or other update logic to consume it.

We hate the way people build tiers for the same reason Cartman hates lines at the amusement park. Sure tiers are great for certain things like building connected microcosms, but most of the time they are overkill and if applied too early make your application needlessly complicated. In the end all we care about is data: serving data, analyzing data, getting good data and everything else is just peacock feathers.

The introduction of JSON type support in PostgreSQL 9.2 and languages PL/V8 (PL/Javascript) and its Pythoness-like twin PL/Coffee provides several options for bringing your data and application closer together since they have native support for JSON. In this first part we'll demonstrate one: An upsert stored procedure that takes a single JSON object instead of separate args and updates existing data and adds missing records. In later articles we'll show you the front end app and also add a sprinkle of PostGIS in there to demonstrate working with custom types.

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Building PLV8JS and PLCoffee for Windows using MingW64 w64-w32

nospam@example.com (Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 18:55:00 -0400

As mentioned in our previous article Building on MingW deploying on VC we often build on MingW and deploy on Windows servers running EDB distributed VC PostgreSQL builds for extensions we want that don't come packaged. One of the new ones we are really excited about is the PL/V8 and PL/Coffee ones. Could we do it and would it actually work on a VC build. YES WE CAN and yes it does. I HAZ Coffee and a V8: .

Here are some instructions we hope others will find useful. Even if you aren't on Windows, you might still find them useful since MingW behaves much like other Unix environments.

UPDATE We rebuilt these against 9.2.1 and PLV8 1.3. Refer to PLV8 1.3 windows binaries for PostgreSQL 9.2 for further details.

If you are on windows, and just want to start using PLV8 and PLCoffee. We have binary builds for both PostgreSQL 9.2 Windows 32-bit (pg92plv8jsbin_w32.zip) and PostgreSQL 9.2 Windows 64-bit (pg92plv8jsbin_w64.zip) which you should be able to just extract into your PostgreSQL 9.2 beta windows install. We quickly tested with EDB VC++ builds and they seem to work fine on standard VC++ PostgreSQL 9.2beta2 installs. We haven't bothered building for lower PostgreSQL, but if there is some interest, we'd be happy to try.

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