Re: postgresql roadmap for horizontal scalability?

On Fri, 2006-12-01 at 09:43 -0800, Timasmith wrote:

> This database has exceeded all expectations
> and perhaps I am getting
> ahead of myself but is there anything in the roadmap to match Oracles
> ability to cluster databases across multiple servers for concurrent
> access?

My experience of Oracle clustering is that database design is incredibly
difficult and requires very careful segregation of transactions to make
it work well. RAC is much better than Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) which
had such a (deservedly) bad reputation they had to change the name. Some
applications work well with it, others work much worse than a
make-one-large-SMP approach, but its fairly hard to be certain which it
will be for any particular app.

So, my take on clustering is that it will be a huge drain on development
resources to get it to work reasonably well (Oracle took 10 years and 3
major versions, note) and that other explicit data
duplication/replication techniques are almost as effective. They are
available now.

I think its clustering is do-able and will come, but not for a while
yet, methinks.

--
Simon Riggs
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com