Re: Proof of concept: standalone backend with full FE/BE protocol

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 7:14 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> This seems to me to be going in exactly the wrong direction. What
> I visualize this feature as responding to is demand for a *simple*,
> minimal configuration, minimal administration, quasi-embedded database.
> What you propose above is not that, but is if anything even more
> complicated for an application to deal with than a regular persistent
> server. More complication is *the wrong thing* for this use case.
>
> The people who would be interested in this are currently using something
> like SQLite within a single application program. It hasn't got any of
> the features you're suggesting either, and I don't think anybody wishes
> it did.

I am failing to understand how one could easily replicate the SQLite
feature of (even fairly poorly) using multiple processes addressing
one database, and supporting multiple executors per-database (which
correspond to every open 'connection' in SQLite, as far as I can
understand). My best thoughts are in the direction of EXEC_BACKEND
and hooking up to a cluster post-facto, but I wasn't really looking
for solutions so much as to raise this (to me) important use-case.

I'm just thinking about all the enormously popular prefork based web
servers out there like unicorn (Ruby), gunicorn (Python), and even
without forking language-specific database abstractions like that seen
in Go ("database/sql") that have decided to make pooling the default
interaction.

It is easiest to use these prefork embedded servers in both in
development and production, so people (rather sensibly) do that --
better parity, and no fuss.

I really would rather not see that regress by appropriating special
mechanics for test/development scenarios with regards to managing
database connections (e.g. exactly one of them), so how do we not make
that a restriction, unless I misunderstood and was a non-restriction
already?

--
fdr