Making use of contrib modules

After this theoretical introduction to extensions, it is time to take a look at some of the most important extensions. In this section, you will learn about modules provided to you as part of the PostgreSQL contrib module. When you install PostgreSQL, I recommend that you always install those contrib modules as they contain vital extensions that can really make your life easier.

In this section, you will be guided through some of the ones I find most interesting.

Using the adminpack

The idea behind the adminpack module is to give administrators a way to access the filesystem without SSH access. The package contains a couple of functions to make that possible.

To load the module into the database, run the following command:

test=# CREATE EXTENSION adminpack; 
CREATE EXTENSION

One of the most interesting features of adminpack module is the ability to inspect log files. The pg_logdir_ls function checks out the log directory and returns a list of log files:

test=# SELECT...