How do you debug functions with postgres?

Question

I'm using pgAdmin III 1.8.4 and finding it a harsh mistress.

When writing stored procedures (functions), there's no query compilation. So I have no idea if my function will work until I call it.

How do other people work around this deficiency? (Other than getting it right first time :p)

Answer 1

EnterpriceDB includes PL/PGSQL Debugger which you can use to step through the code.

Answer 2

Write a unit test for it. Granted this won't give you debugging capability, but you should ideally have a unit test suite (and an integration test suite) that you run against your code that proves that it works... and that lets you know when something breaks.