Re: COMMIT NOWAIT Performance Option

Simon,

One of the things I love about doing informal online user support in the
PostgreSQL community, and formal user support for Sun's customers, is the
almost-ironclad guarentee that if a user has a corrupt database or data loss,
one of three things is true:
a) they didn't apply some recommended PG update;
b) they have a bad disk controller or disk config;
c) they have bad ram.

It seriously narrows down the problem space to know that PostgreSQL does *not*
allow data loss if it's physically possible to prevent it.

Therefore, if we're going to arm a foot-gun as big as COMMIT NOWAIT for
PostgreSQL, I'd like to see the answers to two questions:

a) Please give some examples of performance gain on applications using COMMIT
NOWAIT. The performance gain needs to be substantial (like, 50% to 100%) to
justify a compromise like this.

b) Why this and not global temporary tables or queuing?

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco