So far, you have seen how to write basic functions and triggers in various languages. Of course, many more languages are supported. Some of the most prominent ones are PL/R (R is a powerful statistics package) and PL/v8 (which is based on the Google JavaScript engine). However, those languages are beyond the scope of this chapter (regardless of their usefulness).

In this section, we will focus on improving the performance of a function. There are a few ways in which we can speed up processing:

• Reducing the number of function calls
• Using cached plans
• Giving hints to the optimizer

In this chapter, all three of these areas will be discussed.