Re: Changing the concept of a DATABASE

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On 22 May 2012 18:35, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>>> If I have a customer with 1 database per user, how do they run a query
>>> against 100 user tables? It would require 100 connections to the
>>> database. Doing that would require roughly x100 the planning time and
>>> x100 the connection delay. Larger SQL statements pass their results
>>> between executor steps using libpq rather than direct calls.
>>
>> Why is this hypothetical customer using separate databases?  This really
>> seems like a case of "doctor, it hurts when I do this".
>
> Databases are great for separating things, but sometimes you want to
> un-separate them in a practical way.

In my experience, these un-separations are (thankfully) relieved of
the requirement of consistency between databases, and so the contract
is much more favorable.

The planning time problem is quite hard.

However, I think the connection-delay one is not as hard a one to
answer: I think multiplexed protocols are going to become the norm in
the near future (they have been a pretty uncontested part of the SPDY
protocol, for example, after flow control was added) and have a number
of useful properties, and it may be time to consider how we're going
to divorce the notion of one socket implies exactly one backend.

--
fdr