Re: Horizontal scalability/sharding

On Tue, Sep 01, 2015 at 10:15:27AM +0200, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2015-08-31 20:54:51 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > Uh, we already have a list of things we need to add to FDWs to make them
> > work, and Citus Data has provided a document of more things that are
> > needed, https://goo.gl/vJWF85. I am not sure how much bigger a red flag
> > you want to confirm that everyone agrees that major FDW improvements are
> > a requirement for this.
>
> Several people saying that the FDW infrastructure isn't sufficient right
> now is pretty far from implying that all of them agree that the FDW API
> is the way to go.
>
> I'm not sure myself. If it works out it's going to save us some work and
> make it more realistic to get there sometime not too far off. But I'm
> afraid that the resulting system will feel like our current partitioning
> implemenentation. Yes, it kinda works, but it's hard to get started, it
> doesn't support too many features and you're kind afraid your relatives
> will see what you've done.

Whatever we decide on, we can only count on built-in multi-node being
adopted if all the needed bits needed ship with every PostgreSQL
installation. If we require people do Install More Software™ in order
to get a feature, we're going to lose a majority of our potential
base.

If it turns out we need the PostgreSQL FDW, and I believe some
consensus is starting to gel around that, I can see not installing it
in template1 by default. Even that's a questionable decision, as
merely having the software in place does not credibly increase the
attack surface, and does up the installation procedures by a fallible
step.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
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