Re: Horizontal scalability/sharding

On Tue, Sep  1, 2015 at 09:30:41AM +0530, Pavan Deolasee wrote:
> My worry is that if we start implementing them again from scratch, it will take
> a few years before we get them in a usable state. What XC/XL lacked is probably
> a Robert Haas or a Tom Lane who could look at the work and suggest major edits.
> If that had happened, the quality of the product could have been much better
> today. I don't mean to derate the developers who worked on XC/XL, but there is
> no harm in accepting that if someone with a much better understanding of the
> whole system was part of the team, that would have positively impacted the
> project. Is that an angle worth exploring? Does it make sense to commit some
> more resources to say XC or XL and try to improve the quality of the product
> even further? To be honest, XL is in far far better shape (haven't really tried
> XC in a while) and some more QA/polishing can make it production ready much
> sooner.

There is no question that using XC/XL will get us to a usable solution
faster, but see my recent post to Josh Berkus --- the additional code
will be so burdensome that I doubt it would be accepted. If it was, I
bet we would have considered it long ago.

I think the only way we are going to get sharding into Postgres is to do
it in a way that enhances existing Postgres capabilities.  

(I think we got a little too cute in enhancing existing Postgres
capabilities to add partitioning, and I think we need to fix that.
Hopefully we don't do the same thing with sharding.)

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + Everyone has their own god. +