Re: Postgres refusing to use >1 core

---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 11:04:49 -0500
>From: pgsql-performance-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org (on behalf of Shaun Thomas <sthomas(at)peak6(dot)com>)
>Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Postgres refusing to use >1 core
>To: Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com>
>Cc: Craig Ringer <craig(at)postnewspapers(dot)com(dot)au>,Aren Cambre <aren(at)arencambre(dot)com>,<pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org>
>
>On 05/10/2011 11:26 PM, Scott Marlowe wrote:
>
>> I.e. don't grab 1,000 rows and work on them on the client side and
>> then insert data, do the data mangling in the query in the database.
>> My experience has been that moving things like this into the database
>> can result in performance gains of several factors, taking hour long
>> processes and making them run in minutes.
>
>This is a problem I encounter constantly wherever I go. Programmer
>selects millions of rows from giant table. Programmer loops through
>results one by one doing some magic on them. Programmer submits queries
>back to the database. Even in batches, that's going to take ages.
>
>Databases are beasts at set-based operations. If the programmer can
>build a temp table of any kind and load that, they can turn their
>update/insert/whatever into a simple JOIN that runs several orders of
>magnitude faster. Going the route of parallelism will probably work too,
>but I doubt it's the right solution in this case.
>
>When there are tables with millions of rows involved, processing 111 per
>second is a bug. Even with ten perfectly balanced threads, 30 hours only
>becomes three. On decent hardware, you can probably drop, reload, and
>index the entire table faster than that.
>
>--
>Shaun Thomas
>OptionsHouse | 141 W. Jackson Blvd. | Suite 800 | Chicago IL, 60604
>312-676-8870
>sthomas(at)peak6(dot)com
>
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So, the $64 question: how did you find an engagement where, to bend Shakespeare, "first thing we do, is kill all the coders" isn't required? This RBAR mentality, abetted by xml/NoSql/xBase, is utterly pervasive. They absolutely refuse to learn anything different from the COBOL/VSAM messes of their grandfathers; well modulo syntax, of course. The mere suggestion, in my experience, that doing things faster with fewer lines of code/statements in the engine is met with overt hostility.

Regards,
Robert