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

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-09-05 at 17:03 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> In general I think the selling point for such a feature would be "no
>> administrative hassles", and I believe that has to go not only for the
>> end-user experience but also for the application-developer experience.
>> If you have to manage checkpointing and vacuuming in the application,
>> you're probably soon going to look for another database.
>
> Maybe there could be some hooks (e.g., right after completing a
> statement) that see whether a vacuum or checkpoint is required? VACUUM
> can't be run in a transaction block[1], so there are some details to
> work out, but it might be a workable approach.

If it was me, I'd want finer grained control of if/when automatic
background optimization work happened. Something like
DoBackgroundWork(int forThisManySeconds). Of course, for that to
work, we'd need to have resumable vacuum.

I like the idea of keeping everything single threaded.

merlin