Developing PostgreSQL Extensions in C: Hooks, Shared Memory & Best Practices
Presented by:
Suresh Dash
Suresh is a Senior Solution Architect at Fujitsu, where he oversees Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres.
He has extensive experience with distributed OLTP databases like Yugabyte. He has worked on various backup solutions for MPP-based distributed databases, including GaussDB, and analytics databases like Oracle Essbase.
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PostgreSQL’s extensibility empowers developers to build powerful, custom functionality directly within the database. Writing extensions in C allows maximum performance and integration, but requires a deep understanding of PostgreSQL’s internal architecture, memory management, and hook mechanisms.
This session provides a comprehensive, hands-on exploration of PostgreSQL extension development, including:
- Structuring and organizing C-based extensions for maintainability and performance
- Leveraging hooks to customize core behavior safely without modifying PostgreSQL itself
- Using shared memory and background workers effectively in extensions
- Best practices for stability, version compatibility, and debugging
- Lessons learned from real-world extension development and common pitfalls to avoid
Attendees will gain practical skills to design robust, high-performance extensions, enhance PostgreSQL functionality, and deepen their understanding of the database’s internals. This talk is ideal for developers, DBAs, and anyone eager to master PostgreSQL extensibility.
- Date:
- Duration:
- 45 min
- Room:
- Conference:
- PGConf India, 2026
- Language:
- Track:
- Database Engine Developers
- Difficulty:
- Medium