Re: global temporary tables

On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> Robert,
>
>> (1).  What I *think* it is supposed to mean is that the table is a
>> permanent object which is "globally" visible - that is, it's part of
>> some non-temp schema like public or $user and it's column definitions
>> etc. are visible to all backends - and it's not automatically removed
>> on commit, backend exit, etc. - but the *contents* of the table are
>> temporary and backend-local, so that each new backend initially sees
>> it as empty and can then insert, update, and delete data independently
>> of what any other backend does.
>
> While closer to the standard, the above definition is a lot less useful than
> what I believe a lot of people want, which is a table which is globally
> visible, but has no durability; that is, it does not get WAL-logged or
> recovered on restart.  Certainly this latter definition would be far more
> useful to support materialized views.

I think it's arguable which one is more useful, but I think a good
deal of the infrastructure can be made to serve both purposes, as I
further expounded upon here.

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-04/msg01123.php

...Robert