Re: Reduction in WAL for UPDATEs

Gregory Stark wrote:
> "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
>
>> Yeah, this illustrates my concern that the proposal is too narrowly
>> focused on a specific benchmark.
>
> A lot of the recently proposed changes don't really fit in the "optimizations"
> category very well at all. I think of them more as "avoiding pitfalls".
>
> Currently Postgres works quite well if your application is designed around its
> performance profile. But as soon as you do something "strange" you run the
> risk of running into various pitfalls.

I would go a step further. Once you get into real life scenarios with
real life work loads, you run into various pitfalls.

>
> If you keep a long-running transaction open you suddenly find your tables
> bloating. If your table grows too large vacuum takes too long to complete and
> your tables bloat. If you update the same record many times instead of
> batching updates and performing a single update your table bloats.

Long-running transaction is a big problem. I wish I knew how to solve it.

>
> This one is similar, if you keep a bunch of static data attached to some small
> dynamic data your WAL and table bloats. Certainly you could have engineered
> your system not to fall into this pitfall, but only if you knew about it and
> only if it was worth the effort and other possible costs of doing so.
>

It seems to me the solution could be useful. We have lots of tables that
fall into the category that the test table presented.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

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