Wow, this has been a long hard road toward getting an extension configured and installed. We have used programming skills, system administrative skills, database administrative skills, and wiki editing. Along the way, we saw some Ruby, Python, shell scripting, PL/pgSQL, and MediaWiki.

Believe it or not, this is the simplified process. Hard to imagine, eh? Well, continuous work is being done on the PostgreSQL Extension Network to further simplify this catastrophe of a development system. My thanks go out to David E. Wheeler and crew for making this new system available. As the framework now exists to help with the task, there will be dramatic improvements coming in the months and years ahead.

Now that I'm done complaining about it, this extension system is actually revolutionary. I say this because no other database platform provides any such framework at all. PostgreSQL leads the pack when it comes to the ability to make changes to the basic functionality of the product. The fact that extensions can be installed and removed from the product is an indicator of how inviting PostgreSQL is to the open source community.

Extend it to do whatever you want, and they'll give you the tools to do it. This makes a PostgreSQL server the perfect framework to use for your data processing needs.

In the next chapter, we will learn more about PostgreSQL as an extensible database and look at how to create user-defined data types and operators.