I have been working with PostgreSQL, playing around with Wikipedia’s millions of hyperlinks and such, for 2 years now. I either do my thing directly by sending SQL commands, or I write a client side script in python to manage a million queries when this cannot be done productively (efficiently and effectively) manually.
I would run my python script on my 32bit laptop and have it communicate with a $6000 64bit server running PostgreSQL; I would hence have an extra 2.10 Ghz, 3 GB of RAM, psyco and a multithreaded SQL query manager.
I now realize that it is time for me to level up. I need to learn to server-side script using a procedural language (PL); I really need to reduce network traffic and its inherent serializing overhead.
Now, I really do not feel like researching all the PLs. Knowing that I already know python, and that I am looking for the means between effort and language efficiency, what PL do you guys fancy I should install, learn and use, and why and how?
Since you already known python, PL/Python should be something to look at. And you sound like you write SQL for your database queries, so PL/SQL is a natural extension of that.
PL/SQL feels like SQL, just with all the stuff that you would expect from SQL anyway, like variables for whole rows and the usual control structures of procedural languages. It fits the way you usually interact with the database, but it’s not the most elegant language of all time. I can’t say anything about PL/Python, since I have never used it, but since you know python it should be easy to flip through some examples and see if you like it.