Re: [HACKERS] More CORBA and PostgreSQL

On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Michael Robinson wrote:

> - The ORBit sources appear to be LGPL'ed, which means they can be linked to
> PostgreSQL without poisoning the BSD license.

Mico is also LGPL'd for the libraries...

> I also have bad news to report.
>
> - Most of the CORBA functionality that PostgreSQL would rely on is currently
> unimplemented in ORBit.

I don't know what is implemented, but check out:

http://www.vsb.cs.uni-frankfurt.de/~mico

They "claim" a completely 2.2 Corba implementation...

> - While CORBA provides a very disciplined interface for allowing different
> object implementations (e.g. Python and PostgreSQL) to share the same address
> space and execution context safely and efficiently, the PostgreSQL backend
> doesn't seem ready for it. In particular, it doesn't appear to be thread
> safe. It may not even be reentrant, from what I can tell. And, if a backend
> process is not punctual about reading cache synchronization messages out of
> the IPC queue, it appears that excessive cache invalidation would hurt
> performance.

Hrmmm...does this mean that we are going to have to move towards a
threaded model vs forked? Or is it just going to require some major code
cleanups for the 'thread safe/reentrant' as aspect?

Marc G. Fournier
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org secondary: scrappy(at){freebsd|postgresql}.org