Re: serverless postgresql

Jeff Bowden <jlb(at)houseofdistraction(dot)com> writes:
> That makes sense to me. I wonder if sqlite suffers for this problem
> (e.g. app crashing and corrupting the database).

Likely. I can tell you that Ann Harrison once told me she made a decent
amount of money as a consultant fixing broken Interbase/Firebird
database files. It would be hard to make a living in the same game for
Postgres. Now I don't think that Firebird is any buggier than Postgres.
But it comes in an embedded-library form; I'll bet lunch that most of
those data corruption problems were actually induced by crashes of
surrounding applications.

> What about the notion of running postmaster on-demand as the user?

Possibly. You'd have to think carefully about what conditions the
postmaster should be shut down under, and especially what conditions
it should NOT be shut down under --- eg, a kill to the parent client
application shouldn't cause an ungraceful postmaster exit. It could
be tricky to get the signal handling right, especially under shells that
try to deliver signals to all children of a process being signaled.
On the whole I suspect it'd be easier just to leave the postmaster
running in the background...

> Oh yeah, that brings me to another question. I was looking at the
> postmaster command-line switches and I couldn't find any that would
> allow me to point it at an arbitrary config file

The config files all live in $PGDATA and so are determined by the -D
switch. There was some talk of changing this, awhile back, but it
foundered on lack of consensus about exactly what to do instead.

regards, tom lane