7 Postgres extensions
This chapter covers
- Understanding the basics of Postgres extensibility
- Installing and using Postgres extensions
- Exploring types of extensions useful for developers
- Postgres-compatible solutions
Postgres extensions are one of the main reasons the database has gained so much popularity and adoption. In fact, the motto "Just use Postgres" emerged largely due to its rich ecosystem of extensions, which allow us to use the database well beyond the use cases covered in the earlier chapters of the book. Let’s do a quick overview of the ecosystem of Postgres extensions and practice using one of the extensions that comes preinstalled with the standard Postgres distribution.
7.1 The roots of Postgres extensibility
Postgres originated as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, under the leadership of Michael Stonebraker, a computer scientist and Turing Award winner specializing in database systems. During his Turing Award interview in 2017, Michael Stonebraker shared a story about why extensibility was one of the founding principles of Postgres. He mentioned that in the early 1980s, there were dozens of research papers, all expressing a similar sentiment. A paper would state that relational databases were supposed to be terrific, but in reality, they didn’t work well—or at all—for a particular scenario. The paper would then explain what was invented to fix the problem.