Re: Call for 7.5 feature completion

Rod Taylor wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 21:27 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> 
>>Rod Taylor wrote:
>>
>>
>>>     * Multi-CPU sorts. Take a large single sort like an index creation
>>>       and split the work among multiple CPUs.
> 
>>This really implies threading, doesn't it? And presumably it would have 
>>many possible uses besides this one for doing parallel work, e.g. maybe 
>>the planner could evaluate several alternative plans in parallel.
> 
> I don't think threading is needed.
> 
> I pictured PostgreSQL spawning one process per CPU explicitly for
> sorting which standard backends could use as required to do batch work.

This is one area where PostgreSQL needs a lot of work to catch up to the  competition. Oracle, DB2, Ingres, even SQL
ServerEnterprise edition 
 
all have parallel query capabilities. I have an older 8-processor Sun 
Enterprise 3500, as an example. It still has use with other vendors' 
database products due to their parallel feature set (make -j 9 is nice 
too), but behaves like the boat-anchor it is w.r.t. PostgreSQL.

Mike Mascari