Re: group locking: incomplete patch, just for discussion

On 29 October 2014 12:28, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> I care much more about getting the general infrastructure in place to
> make parallel programming feasible in PostgreSQL than I do about
> getting one particular case working. And more than feasible: I want
> it to be relatively straightforward. That's not simple, but the
> potential rewards are great. Let's face it: there are people here who
> are much better than I am at hacking on the planner and especially the
> executor than I am. Why haven't any of those people implemented
> parallel anything? I think it's because, right now, it's just too
> darn hard. I'm trying to reduce that to something approaching the
> difficulty of writing normal PostgreSQL backend code, and I think I'm
> 6-12 patches away from that. This is one of them and, yeah, it's not
> done, and, yeah, we might not get to parallel anything this release
> and, yeah, things would be going faster if I could work on parallelism
> full time. But I think that the progress we are making is meaningful
> and the goal is within sight.

The role of an immediate working solution is to prove the
infrastructure so far is genuinely useful, helping also to build
interest and understanding.

There is a real danger that your "ta-dah" moment sometime in the
future contains flaws which need to be addressed, but we now have
piles of questionable infrastructure lieing around. If you have
similar doubts about anything I'm doing, please just ask.

If we could see the 6-12 patch descriptions and understand where you
are going it would help.

> I appreciate that you'd probably attack this problem from a different
> direction than I'm attacking it from, but I still think that what I'm
> trying to do is a legitimate direction of attack which, by the way,
> does not preclude anybody else from attacking it from a different
> direction and, indeed, such a development would be most welcome.

Well, I don't have time; been a little busy these last 10 years and
for at least one year more yet before projects open up again.

If I did, I don't think it would be that useful to interfere.
Cooperation seems better use of my time, if possible.

--
Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services