Chapter 43. PL/Perl - Perl Procedural Language
Table of Contents
PL/Perl is a loadable procedural language that enables you to write Postgres Pro functions in the Perl programming language.
The main advantage to using PL/Perl is that this allows use, within stored functions, 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, or from the shell command line use createlang plperl . dbname
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. Users of binary packages might find PL/Perl in a separate subpackage.