Going beyond sql

On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 06:50:48AM +1000, Jon wrote:

I'd like to run some scripts against a postgres database but has more
than just standard SQL commands. I'd like to be able to use conditional
statements (i.e. if .. .then ... ) and such. I had a look and can see
that I could use pgplsql for this. However it seems that it must be part
of a function. Is there any way of doing this without the function
coating as these commands would be a once off?

PostgreSQL's implementation of SQL doesn't have control structures
(aside from simple conditionals like CASE expressions), so you'll
have to write a server-side function in a language like PL/pgSQL
or do the control in client-side code.

--
Michael Fuhr

Jon wrote:

Hi,

I'd like to run some scripts against a postgres database but has more
than just standard SQL commands. I'd like to be able to use
conditional statements (i.e. if .. .then ... ) and such. I had a look
and can see that I could use pgplsql for this. However it seems that
it must be part of a function. Is there any way of doing this without
the function coating as these commands would be a once off?

Jon.

Have you considered writing them in a programming language that connects
to the database? I have to write one-time database code at times, and
writing it in Perl is the most efficient way to do it for me. But then
I also wrote an extremely simple wrapper to the DBI / DBD::Pg module so
that I don't have to muck with the extra house keeping steps in my programs.

--
Thanks,
Laura Vance
Systems Engineer