Our own Noah Misch gave a comprehensive presentation on the operator class facility during the recent PG Con conference. Held last month in Ottawa, PG Con is one of the biggest events for the PostgreSQL community and Noah, a database architect here at EnterpriseDB as well as a committer, drew some buzz for his smart talk on the operator class facility.
For the vast majority of data types, code writers may be able to get away with writing a query expression such as "val >= $1" without knowing the data type of "val." However, Noah points out that this is almost always a mistake, and could even malfunction in some cases.
Noah’s presentation aimed to help developers who sometimes deal with unforeseen data types. And he was trying to help developers audit for mistakes and substitute code that harnesses operator classes and families to process values of arbitrary type. He covered:
- Using operator classes to adapt query expressions to each data type
- The creation of new operator classes
- Exceptional operator classes already present in PostgreSQL
- And more
We’ve shared Noah’s presentation from PG Con, so take his tour of the operator class facility.
Keith Alsheimer is Chief Marketing Officer of EnterpriseDB.