Re: Proof of concept: standalone backend with full FE/BE protocol

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> On 9/5/12 5:59 PM, Daniel Farina wrote:
>> I agree with this, even though in theory (but not in practice)
>> creative use of unix sockets (sorry windows, perhaps some
>> port-allocating and URL mangling can be done instead) and conventions
>> for those would allow even better almost-like-embedded results,
>> methinks. That may still be able to happen.
>
> Sure, everyone who cares can already do this, but some people probably
> don't care enough. Also, making this portable and robust for everyone
> to use, not just your local environment, is pretty tricky. See
> pg_upgrade test script, for a prominent example.

To my knowledge, no one has even really seriously tried to package it
yet and then told the tale of woe, and it was an especially
un-gratifying exercise for quite a while on account of multiple
postgreses not getting along on the same machine because of SysV
shmem.

The bar for testing is a lot different than pg_upgrade (where a
negative consequence is confusing and stressful downtime), and many
programs use fork/threads and multiple connections even in testing,
making its requirements different.

So consider me still skeptical given the current reasoning that unix
sockets can't be a good-or-better substitute, and especially
accounting for programs that need multiple backends.

--
fdr