Re: HTTP Frontend? (and a brief thought on materialized views)

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 10:55 AM, Dobes Vandermeer <dobesv@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, in our case HTTP is a clear win (but not replacement) and SPDY a
> potential one (even as a replacement).  Even if SPDY is not widely adopted
> it could still replace FEBE if there's a clear advantage to using it, I
> don't know enough to make the call right now.

I can see that there are some advantages to having an HTTP interface
to the database, but I think throwing our existing protocol out the
window or relegating it to the status of a second-class citizen would
be foolish.  HTTP is a non-trivial protocol that tends to impose lots
of escaping and de-escaping overhead which is unnecessary for people
who just want to connect to the database and run queries.  I can
completely understand that someone might want the ability to do GET
/db/table/pk and have that return an answer very, very quickly, by
bypassing the usual parser and planner and just firing off an
index-scan and returning the results as JSON or somesuch.  But I think
it would be a serious mistake to assume that GET /q?q=myquery is going
to come out better than what we have now in the general case.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company