Working with Trusted Language Extensions for PostgreSQL

Trusted Language Extensions for PostgreSQL is an open source development kit for building PostgreSQL extensions. It allows you to build high performance PostgreSQL extensions and safely run them on your RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. By using Trusted Language Extensions (TLE) for PostgreSQL, you can create PostgreSQL extensions that follow the documented approach for extending PostgreSQL functionality. For more information, see Packaging Related Objects into an Extension in the PostgreSQL documentation.

One key benefit of TLE is that you can use it in environments that don't provide access to the file system underlying the PostgreSQL instance. Previously, installing a new extension required access to the file system. TLE removes this constraint. It provides a development environment for creating new extensions for any PostgreSQL database, including those running on your RDS for PostgreSQL DB instances.

TLE is designed to prevent access to unsafe resources for the extensions that you create using TLE. Its runtime environment limits the impact of any extension defect to a single database connection. TLE also gives database administrators fine-grained control over who can install extensions, and it provides a permissions model for running them.

TLE is supported on the following RDS for PostgreSQL versions:

The Trusted Language Extensions development environment and runtime are packaged as the pg_tle PostgreSQL extension, version 1.0.1. It supports creating extensions in JavaScript, Perl, Tcl, PL/pgSQL, and SQL. You install the pg_tle extension in your RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance in the same way that you install other PostgreSQL extensions. After the pg_tle is set up, developers can use it to create new PostgreSQL extensions, known as TLE extensions.

In the following topics, you can find information about how to set up Trusted Language Extensions and how to get started creating your own TLE extensions.