Re: Parallel postgresql

Martin Rusoff wrote:
> I was just contemplating how to make postgres parallel (for DSS
> applications)... Has anyone done work on this? It looks to me like there
> are a couple of obvious places to add parallel operation:
>
> Stage 1) I/O , perhaps through MPIO - would improve tablescanning and
> load/unload operations. One (or more) Postgresql servers would use
> MPIO/ROMIO to access a parallel file system like PVFS or GPFS(IBM).
>
> Stage 2) Parallel Postgres Servers, with the postmaster spawning off the
> server on a different node (possibly borrowing some code from GNU queue)
> and doing any buffer twiddling with RPC for that connection, The client
> connection would still be through the proxy on the postmaster node? (kind
> of like MOSIX)

One idea would be to throw parts of the executor (like a table sort) to
different machines or to different processors on the same machine,
perhaps via dblink. You could use threads to send several requests and
wait for their results.

Threading the entire backend would be hard, but we could thread some
parts of it by having slave backends doing some of the work in parallel.

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