Functions: Use and Misuse

Presented by:

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Henrietta Dombrovskaya

BrokerX

``` Henrietta Dombrovskaya is a database researcher and developer with over 35 years of academic and industrial experience. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saint Petersburg, Russia. At present she is

  • A Senior Cloud Consultant at Enterprise DB
  • Local Organizer of the Chicago PostgreSQL User Group
  • Active community member, a frequent speaker at the PostgreSQL Conferences
  • A researcher focused on developing efficient interactions between applications and databases; publications include Proceedings of EDBT 2014 Athens, ICDE 2016 in Helsinki, and SOFSEM 2020 Limassol
  • A winner of the “Technologist of the Year” 2019 award of the Illinois Technology Association
  • An author of PostgreSQL Query Optimization book ```

Functions are among the most underused and misused of PostgreSQL objects. Since all modern programming languages include user-defined functions, people often assume that database functions are cut from the same cloth and if you know how to write functions and when to write functions in an application programming language, you can apply this knowledge to PostgreSQL. This could not be further from the truth.

In this presentation, we will discuss how PostgreSQL functions are different from functions in other programming languages, when functions should be created and when they should not, how the usage of functions can improve performance, and how it can lead to major performance degradation.

The audience will learn:

  • How functions are executed
  • How usage of functions affects performance
  • How to use functions with user-defined types
  • Advantages and disadvantages of using functions in OPT and OLAP environments
  • How to use functions with dynamic SQL

Date:
2021 October 26 13:00 EDT
Duration:
1 h
Room:
Online
Conference:
2021 Postgres Conference Webinars
Language:
Track:
Dev
Difficulty:
Requires Registration:
Yes (Registered: 127)