Re: PgPool or alternatives

Simon,

* Simon Windsor (simon(dot)windsor(at)cornfield(dot)me(dot)uk) wrote:
> My employer wants to move from an in house Oracle solution to a
> cloud based Postgres system. The system will involve a number of
> data loaders running 24x7 feeding several Postgres Databases that
> will be used by internal applications and external customer
> applications.
>
> For the record, internal and external applications make heavy use of
> Temporary tables, that are session related. This requirement means I
> cannot consider normal replication methods.
>
> Is PgPool the only viable that will allow the system the data
> loaders to feed [n] databases that will be functional identical?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'functional identical', but I wouldn't
generally consider that to be a property of pgpool (or pgbouncer, or any
other connection pooler, really).

That said, my general feeling is that pgbouncer tends to be simpler,
faster, and less likely to introduce oddities that you don't expect.
The 'session' mode might work for you, though it might be debatable if
that really helps you all that much. 'transaction' mode is what I
usually recommend as it allows idle connections to be handled by
pgbouncer (unlike 'session' mode), but there are caveats to using that
mode, of course.

I'm a bit curious where you're thinking of using the connection pooler
also though. If you have data loaders running 24x7 feeding data
constantly to PG, do you really need a connection pooler for those?
Connection poolers make a lot of sense for environments where there's
lots of down-time on the connection, but the less down-time, the less
they make sense.

Thanks!

Stephen