1.Structure of PL/pgSQL
The structure of PL/pgSQL is like below:
[ <<label>> ]
[ DECLARE declarations ]
BEGIN
statements
END [ label ];
A label is only needed if you want to identify the block for use in an EXIT statement, or to qualify the names of the variables declared in the block. If a label is given after END, it must match the label at the block’s beginning.
Any statement in the statement section of a block can be a subblock. Variables declared in a subblock mask any similarly-named variables of outer blocks for the duration of the subblock; but you can access the outer variables anyway if you qualify their names with their block’s label. For example:
CREATE FUNCTION somefunc() RETURNS integer AS $$
<< outerblock >>
DECLARE
quantity integer := 30;
BEGIN
RAISE NOTICE ’Quantity here is %’, quantity; -- Prints 30
quantity := 50;
--
-- Create a subblock
--
DECLARE
quantity integer := 80;
BEGIN
RAISE NOTICE ’Quantity here is %’, quantity; -- Prints 80
RAISE NOTICE ’Outer quantity here is %’, outerblock.quantity; -- Prints 50
END;
RAISE NOTICE ’Quantity here is %’, quantity; -- Prints 50
RETURN quantity;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
There is actually a hidden “outer block” surrounding the body of any PL/pgSQL function
2.Declarations
All variables used in a block must be declared in the declarations section of the block(for expection: loop variable in FOR for integer and record).
name [ CONSTANT ] type [ COLLATE collation_name ] [ NOT NULL ] [ { DEFAULT | := | = } expression ];
Here are some examples of variable declarations:
user_id integer;
quantity numeric(5);
url varchar;
myrow tablename%ROWTYPE;
myfield tablename.columnname%TYPE;
arow RECORD;
2.1 Declaring Function Parameters
Parameters passed to functions are named with the identifiers $1, $2 give a name to the parameter in the CREATE FUNCTION command, for example:
CREATE FUNCTION sales_tax(subtotal real) RETURNS real AS $$
BEGIN
RETURN subtotal * 0.06;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
The other way is to explicitly declare an alias, using the declaration syntax:
CREATE FUNCTION sales_tax(real) RETURNS real AS $$
DECLARE
subtotal ALIAS FOR $1;
BEGIN
RETURN subtotal * 0.06;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
2.2 Copying Types
variable%TYPE
%TYPE provides the data type of a variable or table column.
To declare a variable with the same data type as users.user_id you write:
user_id users.user_id%TYPE;
2.3 Row Types
To declare a variable as the same type of a table row, use:
name table_name%ROWTYPE;
name composite_type_name;
A variable of a composite type is called a row variable (or row-type variable). Such a variable can hold a whole row of a SELECT or FOR query result.
The individual fields of the row value are accessed using the usual dot notation, for example rowvar.field.
2.4 Record Types
To declare a variable to store a unknown table row type, use:
name RECORD;
Record variables are similar to row-type variables, but they have no predefined structure.
The substructure of a record variable can change each time it is assigned to.RECORD is not a true data type, only a placeholder.
3.Expressions
All expressions used in PL/pgSQL statements are processed using the server’s main SQL executor.
For example, when you write a PL/pgSQL statement like:
IF expression THEN ...
PL/pgSQL will evaluate the expression by feeding a query like:
SELECT expression
For example, if we have declared two integer variables x and y, and we write
IF x < y THEN ...
what happens behind the scenes is equivalent to
PREPARE statement_name(integer, integer) AS SELECT $1 < $2;
and then this prepared statement is EXECUTEd for each execution of the IF statement, with the current values of the PL/pgSQL variables supplied as parameter values.
4.Basic Statements
In this section and the following ones, we describe all the statement types that are explicitly understood by PL/pgSQL.
4.1 Assignment
An assignment of a value to a PL/pgSQL variable is written as:
variable { := | = } expression;
4.2 Executing a Command With No Result**
For any SQL command that does not return rows, for example INSERT without a RETURNING clause, you can execute the command within a PL/pgSQL function just by writing the command.
To evaluate an expression or SELECT query but discard the result, use:
PERFORM query;
PERFORM functionxxx();
PERFORM * from tablexxx;
4.3 Executing a Query with a Single-row Result
The result of a SQL command yielding a single row (possibly of multiple columns) can be assigned to a record variable, row-type variable, or list of scalar variables. This is done by writing the base SQL command and adding an INTO clause. For example,
SELECT select_expressions INTO [STRICT] target FROM ...;
INSERT ... RETURNING expressions INTO [STRICT] target;
UPDATE ... RETURNING expressions INTO [STRICT] target;
DELETE ... RETURNING expressions INTO [STRICT] target;
(here,INTO means pass a value to the variable target ,but not insert into a table,if you want to do so ,use:
CREATE TABLE ... AS SELECT clause)
The INTO clause can appear almost anywhere in the SQL command. Customarily it is written either just before or just after the list of select_expressions in a SELECT command, or at the end of the command for other command types. It is recommended that you follow this convention in case the PL/pgSQL parser becomes stricter in future versions.
4.4 Executing Dynamic Commands
Oftentimes you will want to generate dynamic commands inside your PL/pgSQL functions, that is, commands that will involve different tables or different data types each time they are executed.
EXECUTE command-string [ INTO [STRICT] target ] [ USING expression [, ... ] ];
command-string is an expression yielding a string (of type text) containing the command to be executed.
The optional target is a record variable, a row variable, or a comma-separated list of simple variables and record/row fields, into which the results of the command will be stored.
The optional USING expressions supply values to be inserted into the command.
The INTO clause specifies where the results of a SQL command returning rows should be assigned.
If the STRICT option is given, an error is reported unless the query produces exactly one row.
An example is:
EXECUTE ’SELECT count(*) FROM mytable WHERE inserted_by = $1 AND inserted <= $2’
INTO c
USING checked_user, checked_date;
Note that parameter symbols can only be used for data values — if you want to use dynamically determined table or column names, you must insert them into the command string textually.
to use dynamically determined table or column names, use function quote_ident() to turn text to SQL identifier:
EXECUTE ’SELECT count(*) FROM ’
|| quote_ident(tabname)
|| ’ WHERE inserted_by = $1 AND inserted <= $2’
INTO c
USING checked_user, checked_date;
A cleaner approach is to use format()’s %I specification for table or column names (strings separated by a newline are concatenated):
EXECUTE format(’SELECT count(*) FROM %I ’
’WHERE inserted_by = $1 AND inserted <= $2’, tabname)
INTO c
USING checked_user, checked_date;
Another restriction on parameter symbols is that they only work in SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE commands. In other statement types (generically called utility statements), you must insert values textually even if they are just data values.
5.Obtaining the Result Status
There are several ways to determine the effect of a command(GET DIAGNOSTICS and FOUND).
The first method is to use the GET DIAGNOSTICS command, which has the form:
GET [ CURRENT ] DIAGNOSTICS variable { = | := } item [ , ... ];
This command allows retrieval of system status indicators. CURRENT is a noise word. Each item is a key word identifying a status value to be assigned to the specified variable (which should be of the right data type to receive it). The currently available status items are shown below.
The second method to determine the effects of a command is to check the special variable named FOUND, which is of type boolean. FOUND starts out false within each PL/pgSQL function call. It is set by each of the following types of statements:
- A SELECT INTO statement sets FOUND true if a row is assigned, false if no row is returned.
- A PERFORM statement sets FOUND true if it produces (and discards) one or more rows, false if no row is
produced. - UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE statements set FOUND true if at least one row is affected, false if no row
is affected. - A FETCH statement sets FOUND true if it returns a row, false if no row is returned.
- A MOVE statement sets FOUND true if it successfully repositions the cursor, false otherwise.
- A FOR or FOREACH statement sets FOUND true if it iterates one or more times, else false. FOUND is
set this way when the loop exits; inside the execution of the loop, FOUND is not modified by the loop
statement, although it might be changed by the execution of other statements within the loop body. - RETURN QUERY and RETURN QUERY EXECUTE statements set FOUND true if the query returns at least
one row, false if no row is returned.
Other PL/pgSQL statements do not change the state of FOUND. Note in particular that EXECUTE changes the output of GET DIAGNOSTICS, but does not change FOUND. FOUND is a local variable within each PL/pgSQL function; any changes to it affect only the current function.
6.Doing Nothing At All
Sometimes a placeholder statement that does nothing is useful. For example, it can indicate that one arm of an if/then/else chain is deliberately empty. For this purpose, use the NULL statement:
NULL;
For example, the following two fragments of code are equivalent:
BEGIN
y := x / 0;
EXCEPTION
WHEN division_by_zero THEN
NULL; -- ignore the error
END;
BEGIN
y := x / 0;
EXCEPTION
WHEN division_by_zero THEN -- ignore the error
END;
Which is preferable is a matter of taste.