Why does slony use a cursor? Anyone know?

Hey everyone,

Frankly, I'm shocked at what I just found.

We did a delete last night of a few million rows, and come back this
morning to find that slony is 9-hours behind. After some investigation,
it became apparent that slony opens up a cursor and orders it by the
log_actionseq column. Then it fetches 500 rows, and closes the cursor.
So it's fetching several million rows into a cursor, to fetch 500, and
then throw the rest away.

That is quite possibly the least efficient manner I could think of to
build a sync system, so maybe someone knows why they did it that way?

At least with a regular query, it could sort by the column it wanted,
and put a nifty index on it for those 500-row chunks it's grabbing. I
must be missing something...

Yeah, I know... millions of rows + slony = bad. But it doesn't have to
be *this* bad. Even a few hundred thousand rows would be terrible with
this design.

I plan on asking the slony guys too, but I figured someone on this list
might happen to know.

Looks like I might have to look into Bucardo or Londiste.

Thanks!

--
Shaun Thomas
OptionsHouse | 141 W. Jackson Blvd. | Suite 500 | Chicago IL, 60604
312-676-8870
sthomas(at)optionshouse(dot)com

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