In many cases, you don't just want to execute some SQL and forget about it. In most cases, a procedure will loop over the result and do something with it. The following example will show how you can loop over the output of a query. On top of that, I decided to beef up the example a bit and make the function return a composite datatype. Working with composite types in Perl is very easy because you can simply stuff the data into a hash and return it.
The return_next function will gradually build up the result set until the function is terminated with a simple return statement.
The example in this listing generates a table consisting of random values:
CREATE TYPE random_type AS (a float8, b float8); CREATE ...
