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by asah 1166 days ago
no seriously, PL/pgsql is pretty horrible and obscure. But aside from subjective comments, there's very few algorithms available for it, approximately 0% of engineers know it and it's not taught in school, has little tooling compared with a first class programming language, you can't run pl/pgsql code outside of PostgreSQL, and (tell me when to stop)

PL/PGSQL is fine for "a bit more than a SELECT statement" and for very simple algorithms of <50 LOC. Anything more and please use a first class language like plrust, plv8, etc.
2 comments
ttfkam 1166 days ago
The decision between pl/pgsql and something like plv8 isn't LOC. It's whether the solution best fits a set-oriented model or a procedural model. Both are valid, just different use cases.

There are a lot of cases where plv8 will thrash back and forth between the internals of Postgres and C and its v8 engine. These are usually the cases where set theory dominates the solution space.

On the flip side, if you're doing a lot of filter/map/reduce on large JSON payloads, plv8 is demonstrably better than pl/pgsql.

Right tool. Right job.

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pjmlp 1166 days ago
The same engineers that use to rave about NoSQL a couple of years ago?
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