Re: why postgresql over other RDBMS

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> Erik Jones wrote:
>> And, to finish up, is there any reason that pg_restore couldn't
>> already work with separate processes working in parallel?

> The problem is that the ordering of objects in the dump is the only
> thing that makes the dump consistent with regards to the dependencies of
> objects. So pg_restore cannot make any assumptions of parallelisability
> of the restoration process of objects in the dump.

That's true at the level of DDL operations, but AFAIK we could
parallelize table-loading and index-creation steps pretty effectively
--- and that's where all the time goes.

A more interesting question is what sort of hardware you need for that
actually to be a win, though. Loading a few tables in parallel sounds
like an ideal recipe for oversaturating your disk bandwidth...

regards, tom lane