Re: Proposal: Job Scheduler

On Thu, 6 Jun 2024 at 09:47, Laurenz Albe <laurenz(dot)albe(at)cybertec(dot)at> wrote:

> On Thu, 2024-06-06 at 16:27 +0800, Wang Cheng wrote:
> > We are the PostgreSQL team in Tencent. We have recently developed a job
> scheduler
> > that runs inside the database to schedules and manages jobs similar to
> Oracle
> > DBMS_JOB package, and we would like to contribute this feature to the
> community.
> >
> > As far as we know, there are currently two open-sourced job scheduling
> extensions
> > for PostgreSQL: pg_cron (https://github.com/citusdata/pg_cron/) and
> pg_dbms_job
> > (https://github.com/MigOpsRepos/pg_dbms_job/tree/main) However, the
> cron-based
> > syntax is not easy to use and suffers some limitations like one-off
> commands.
> > The pg_dbms_job extension is difficult to manage and operate because it
> runs as
> > a standalone process .
>
> There is also pg_timetable:
> https://github.com/cybertec-postgresql/pg_timetable

And probably the oldest of them all, pgAgent:
https://www.pgadmin.org/docs/pgadmin4/8.7/pgagent.html

>
>
> > That's why we have developed the job scheduler that runs as a process
> inside the
> > database just like autovacuum.
> >
> > We can start to send the patch if this idea makes sense to the you.
>
> Perhaps your job scheduler is much better than all the existing ones.
> But what would be a compelling reason to keep it in the PostgreSQL source
> tree?
> With PostgreSQL's extensibility features, it should be possible to write
> your
> job scheduler as an extension and maintain it outside the PostgreSQL
> source.
>
> I am sure that the PostgreSQL community will be happy to use the extension
> if it is any good.
>

I agree. This is an area in which there are lots of options at the moment,
with compelling reasons to choose from various of them depending on your
needs.

It's this kind of choice that means it's unlikely we'd include any one
option in PostgreSQL, much like various other tools such as failover
managers or poolers.

--
Dave Page
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