PL/Python – Python inside the PostgreSQL RDBMS

PostgreSQL (or “Postgres”) is an immensely powerful, incredibly extensible relational database, released under a permissive open source licence that is similar to that of CPython. PL/Python is one of PostgreSQL’s standard server-side procedural languages, through which Python stored functions can be defined that can be called directly from SQL, quite seamlessly.

Play to the strengths of Postgres, by writing application business logic within the database in either Python 2 or Python 3. Enforce advanced business rules using Python, including constraints on both tables and database level datatypes (“domains”). By pushing the logic tier into the database, you can potentially greatly increasing your application’s scalability by minimising the number of database roundtrips.

Includes case studies and topical coverage of PL/Python related enhancements in upcoming 9.1 release, and recent 9.0 release. The talk only assumes a very basic understanding of databases.