Before we discuss these steps, we readily admit there is a lot of work involved here, and most of it is beyond the scope of this book. However, this is the minimum list of components necessary for a functional shard API. Fortunately, we only have to build this once!
The first step is to learn one of the procedural languages that PostgreSQL provides for database interaction. The core PostgreSQL server comes with PL/pgSQL, PL/Tcl, PL/Perl, or PL/Python as possible choices, though there are many more such as Java, Ruby, or even PHP. Each of these has different performance characteristics and varying levels of difficulty, so choose whichever you are most comfortable with or whichever produces the best results. We used the pgSQL ...
