> how would an instance of your program know what to connect to, or which
> previous instance its 'predecessor' was ?

> normally, you have ONE database for a given set of applications, and all
> the applications share the same database tables and such.

That's the problem, is there some way to tell pgsql "Go to dir X, open your data base Y and prepare for connections at adress Z and port P"? And could pgsql accept multiple connections on the same address and port? I was thinking of using my pID but that would change and if I used a user created string then if I started only on a single instace of pgsql and pointed it to it's databases the user might get the strings duplicated and that would be no good. I also thought of naming each database with a name generated by using the uuid library but I'm not sure which would be best.

 

If I choose to have multiple servers running on the same machine how would my program start them?

 

> Is each runtime instance of your application to have a new, empty
> database? No data from any other run of the application?

 

No, the dynamically generated content is to be dropped (drop table dynamic_content;) but the rest is to be preserved. The idea is to create a database of a file system but the files contain no data, I only want their metadata and I will add a few additional metadta values to each file.

 

Thanks, David