Chapter 14. PL/Perl - Perl Procedural Language

PL/Perl is a loadable procedural language that enables the Perl programming language to be used to write PostgreSQL functions.

Overview

In PL/Perl, certain Perl operations are disabled to preserve security. In general, the operations that are restricted are those that interact with the environment. This includes file handle operations, require, and use (for external modules). There is no way to access internals of the database backend or to gain OS-level access under the permissions of the PostgreSQL user ID, as a C function can do. Thus, any unprivileged database user may be permitted to use this language.