Rod Taylor wrote:
On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 21:27 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
Rod Taylor wrote:
* Multi-CPU sorts. Take a large single sort like an index creation
and split the work among multiple CPUs.
This really implies threading, doesn't it? And presumably it would have
many possible uses besides this one for doing parallel work, e.g. maybe
the planner could evaluate several alternative plans in parallel.
I don't think threading is needed.
I pictured PostgreSQL spawning one process per CPU explicitly for
sorting which standard backends could use as required to do batch work.
This is one area where PostgreSQL needs a lot of work to catch up to the
competition. Oracle, DB2, Ingres, even SQL Server Enterprise edition
all have parallel query capabilities. I have an older 8-processor Sun
Enterprise 3500, as an example. It still has use with other vendors'
database products due to their parallel feature set (make -j 9 is nice
too), but behaves like the boat-anchor it is w.r.t. PostgreSQL.
Mike Mascari
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TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
