Re: getting the most of out multi-core systems for repeated complex SELECT statements

Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 8:57 AM, <gnuoytr(at)rcn(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> Time for my pet meme to wiggle out of its hole (next to Phil's, and a day later). For PG to prosper in the future, it has to embrace the multi-core/processor/SSD machine at the query level. It has to. And
>>
>
> I'm pretty sure multi-core query processing is in the TODO list. Not
> sure anyone's working on it tho. Writing a big check might help.
>

Work on the exciting parts people are interested in is blocked behind
completely mundane tasks like coordinating how the multiple sessions are
going to end up with a consistent view of the database. See "Export
snapshots to other sessions" at
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/ClusterFeatures for details on that one.

Parallel query works well for accelerating CPU-bound operations that are
executing in RAM. The reality here is that while the feature sounds
important, these situations don't actually show up that often. There
are exactly zero clients I deal with regularly who would be helped out
by this. The ones running web applications whose workloads do fit into
memory are more concerned about supporting large numbers of users, not
optimizing things for a single one. And the ones who have so much data
that single users running large reports would seemingly benefit from
this are usually disk-bound instead.

The same sort of situation exists with SSDs. Take out the potential
users whose data can fit in RAM instead, take out those who can't
possibly get an SSD big enough to hold all their stuff anyway, and
what's left in the middle is not very many people. In a database
context I still haven't found anything better to do with a SSD than to
put mid-sized indexes on them, ones a bit too large for RAM but not so
big that only regular hard drives can hold them.

I would rather strongly disagree with the suggestion that embracing
either of these fancy but not really as functional as they appear at
first approaches is critical to PostgreSQL's future. They're
specialized techniques useful to only a limited number of people.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us
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