Re: Could postgres12 support millions of sequences? (like 10 million)

I see.

Any suggestion? It should behave like a sequence in the sense that
concurrent transitions will get different numbers from this alternative
sequence like solution.

In our case, we will need to do a call nextval('some_seq') (or similar)
from different processes no more than twice every minute.

It would be nice to have a sequence data type. Correct me if I am wrong,
but It seems to me that a sequence data type would cost the same or less
than the current sequence implementation.

The schema would be more clear too. We could have a table like:

CREATE TABLE pair(
group INT NOT NULL,
element INT NOT NULL,
seq SEQUENCE INCREMENT 1
START 1
CACHE 1
MINVALUE 1
MAXVALUE 99999999
NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT PRIMARY KEY (group, element)
);

And then:

INSERT INTO event(group, element, code)
VALUES (
1,
1,
( SELECT seq.nextval('code_1_1_seq') FROM pair p WHERE p.group=1
and p.code=1 )
);

Or perhaps storing all the sequences in the same table as rows will have
the same behavior.

Pablo

On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 7:56 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Michael Lewis <mlewis(at)entrata(dot)com> writes:
> > On Thu, Mar 19, 2020, 5:48 PM David G. Johnston <
> david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com>
> > wrote:
> >> However, one other consideration with sequences: do you care that
> >> PostgreSQL will cache/pin (i.e., no release) every single sequence you
> >> touch for the lifetime of the session? (I do not think DISCARD matters
> here
> >> but I'm just guessing)
>
> > Would you expand on this point or is there someplace specific in the
> > documentation on this?
>
> I think what David is worried about is that a sequence object is a
> one-row table in PG's implementation. Thus
>
> (1) each sequence requires a dozen or two rows in assorted system
> catalogs (not sure exactly how many offhand).
>
> (2) each sequence uses up 8KB on disk for its table file.
>
> (3) each sequence you actually access within a particular session
> results in creation of relcache and catcache entries in that
> session's local memory. I'm not sure offhand how big those are
> either, but a few KB per sequence would be a reasonable guess.
>
> (4) each sequence competes for space in the shared-buffer arena,
> since its 8K block has to be swapped into there whenever you try
> to access/increment the sequence's value.
>
> This is all mighty inefficient of course, and there's been talk
> of trying to reduce the per-sequence overhead; but I don't know
> of anyone actively working on that. As things stand, I think
> having millions of sequences would be quite painful performance-
> wise, especially if your workload were actively hitting a lot
> of them concurrently. It would work, for some value of "work",
> but it wouldn't perform very well.
>
> Also, as multiple people mentioned already, this still wouldn't
> guarantee gap-free sequences of ID values.
>
> regards, tom lane
>