Re: 7.4 Press Release -- Draft #4

On Mon, 2003-07-28 at 19:16, Gavin Sherry wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, Josh Berkus wrote:
>
> > Robert,
> >
> > > Aside from spec compliance, whats the bonus for having it then? Or put a
> > > better way, why/when would I want to use this?
> >
> > One scenario: You have 5 PostgreSQL servers connecting to one SAN or NAS
> > which is your /data directory for a single database. You use your
> > middleware to distribute requests among the servers; One server gets data
> > write requests, the other 4 get read-only requests.
> >
> > However, you want to make sure that if your middleware hiccups you don't
> > corrupt the database files. For this, setting 4 of the servers to "Read Only
> > Transactions" would be useful.
>
> That will not work because the writer maintains a cache of data to write
> and worse case scenario, the data only gets written to data files every
> CHECKPOINT. This means that your four readers are returning corrupted
> data. Moreover, the readers do not expect the data to change undernearth
> them, as they maintain caches and would have no mechanism to invalidate
> that cache upon external file system changes. Load balancing and
> clustering is hard :P.
>
> It is, however, generally used with READ UNCOMMITTED transactions. In
> fact, SQL99 necessitates READ ONLY for READ UNCOMMITTED isolation level
> (READ UNCOMMITTED allows you to see uncommitted data modifications).
>

I was really looking for the nie one-line answer that might go in a
press release, but I don't think this is one of those types of features.
Sure, it can be useful in some places, and it adds to spec compliance,
but I don't think it is big enough to need mentioning in the press
release.

Robert Treat
--
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