John R Pierce wrote:
> On 05/21/11 10:41 PM, Darren Duncan wrote:
>> Well, if you can run a stored procedure automatically when Postgres
>> starts, that looks like a necessary step to being able to implement an
>> entire application inside Postgres.
>>
>> Starting Postgres is running the application. The analogy is that
>> Postgres is the VM/language interpreter and the stored procedure is
>> the script to run.
>>
>> Now if said stored procedure has access to features that collectively
>> let it be computationally complete, including arbitrary user I/O, then
>> you're done.
>
> adding a
>
> psql -d dbname -c "select myfunc()" &
>
> to your postgres service start script would satisfy this....
Good that this at least is possible, and ostensibly it is good enough.
I was actually thinking of something more on the line of a trigger, such that
the system allows triggers to respond to a wide variety of stimulus, such as the
stimulus of the DBMS starting up, rather than just the stimulus of
data-manipulating a table. For the purpose I mention, ideally the user wouldn't
have to know the name of the main program routine, but would just know, its the
database or cluster. You could package your database cluster and say that *is*
the application.
> ...but your entire application would be running in a single
> transaction. I don't think thats a good thing.
Absolutely. But if the kind of stored procedures were supported that can do
anything a database client can do, including transaction control statements,
then the main program routine would typically be one of those.
-- Darren Duncan