Re: Postgres vr.s Oracle

"Jonah H. Harris" <jonah.harris@gmail.com> writes:

> Threading has been supported by every major OS for how long now?  How
> buggy is it really?  A heck of a lot of stuff is written using threads
> and it runs continuously and under heavy load without a single
> problem.  Asynchronous I/O... Oracle8i supported it in 1999 (and in
> earlier versions if you knew how to enable it).

And it was buggy as hell. In any case 1999 is pretty recent, we support plenty
of platforms which predate 1999.

Threading is a programming model. If it's convenient to program using it then
you use it. If it isn't there are several other ways to multi-thread your
program without using OS threads.

On modern operating systems (ie, excluding Windows) there's no functional
difference between multiple processes with shared memory and threads. All the
major operating systems use a single-level scheduler where processes and
threads are treated identically. The only difference between them is the
programmer convenience of having all memory shared by default instead of
having all memory private by default.

You pick your programming tools based on what's convenient for the program
you're writing. You don't structure your whole program around wanting to use
your favourite API whether that's threads or async i/o or whatever. There are
plenty of other ways to get the same functionality.

> My point is simply that this isn't new or untested technology, and that we
> should at least be open to it. But when our own FAQ calls threading buggy,
> crash-prone, overly complex, and not worth it from a performance standpoint,
> it makes a lot of people question the amount of Postgres community
> experience related to performance engineering.

There are always people out there with all kinds of wacky ideas.

--
  Gregory Stark
  EnterpriseDB          http://www.enterprisedb.com
  Ask me about EnterpriseDB's PostGIS support!