Chapter 43. PL/Perl - Perl Procedural Language

PL/Perl is a loadable procedural language that enables you to write PostgreSQL functions and procedures in the Perl programming language .

The main advantage to using PL/Perl is that this allows use, within stored functions and procedures, of the manyfold " string munging " operators and functions available for Perl. Parsing complex strings might be easier using Perl than it is with the string functions and control structures provided in PL/pgSQL.

To install PL/Perl in a particular database, use CREATE EXTENSION plperl .

Tip

If a language is installed into template1 , all subsequently created databases will have the language installed automatically.

Note

Users of source packages must specially enable the build of PL/Perl during the installation process. (Refer to Chapter 17 for more information.) Users of binary packages might find PL/Perl in a separate subpackage.