Re: Scheduler in Postgres

As I mentioned before, I think most (if not all) of the development
effort would be outside the core database, meaning any of us would be
able to work on it (as opposed to internal stuff which requires a lot
more knowledge). There are two features dbms_job has that would probably
require some internal support:

In oracle, jobs are fired off by the database engine. If the database is
up and job support is enabled, your jobs will run. Without some kind of
support for the database to fire up connections and execute some kind of
code we would have to rely on some external means to do so. This is less
robust, isn't cross-platform, and requires more work of the end-users.

The other feature is that the connection running jobs in oracle has the
ability to re-create the connection environment used to submit the job.
This means jobs are run as the same user who submitted the job, and
certain session settings are also duplicated. In PostgreSQL, there's
currently no way to assume the identity of another user.

Even with lack of support for these two features, I still think it would
be very usefull to create a generic job system, probably as a pgFoundary
project. Enough people have asked about it that I'm sure there's plenty
of re-invented code out there. If we have a solid framework that people
are using, we'll have a much stronger case for getting the two features
I mentioned added to the back-end.

On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 08:58:00AM -0500, Geoffrey wrote:
> Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>
> >cron isn't really part of the OS. Up until 8.0, any OS that Postgres
> >ran on had cron. I have seen claims that there is a version of cron that
> >runs under windows, but haven't verified that. Given this I don't see
> >how a dependence on cron is going to cause you portability problems.
>
> I would prefer the development effort be applied to more specific
> database engine issues and enhancements. As Bruno has noted, you can
> get some variation of cron on virtually every OS that runs Postgresql.
>
> --
> Until later, Geoffrey
>
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