My thanks to Jonathan Katz for his presentation, “Trusted Language Extensions for PostgreSQL”, at last week’s Postgres Extension Ecosystem Mini-Summit. As usual I’ve collected the transcript here interspersed with comments from the chat window. First, links!
- Video
- PDF Slides [TBD]
And now, rivers of text!
Introduction
- I opened the meeting and introduced Jonathan Katz.
Presentation
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Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to talk about this, and extensions in general. I see a lot of folks here I know and recognize and some new folks or folks I’ve not met in person yet.
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Borrowed from the original presentation on TLEs from November of 2022, to level set on why we built it. I know this is a slightly more advanced audience, so some stuff that might seem relatively introductory to some of you, though there is some material on the internals of extensions.
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The premise is why we decided to build TLEs, what were the problems we’re trying to solve. Part of it is just understanding Postgres extensions. In general this group is very familiar with Extensions but there are two points I want to hit on.
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One of the things that excites me most about Postgres is that, when you look back at Postgres as the Berkeley database project researching how to create an object relational database, an accidental or intentional features is not just that Postgres is an object-relational database, but that Postgres is an extensible database, built from the get-go to be able to add functionality without necessarily having to fork it.
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Early on you’d have to Fork the database to add additional functionality, but the beauty of the Postgres design was the ability to keep adding functionality without forking.