Re: Incremental results from libpq

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> I'm at LinuxWorld Frankfurt and one of the Trolltech guys came over
> to talk to me about this.  He opined that it would be beneficial for
> their purpose (in certain cases) if the server would first compute
> the entire result set and keep it in the server memory (thus
> eliminating potential errors of the 1/x kind) and then ship it to the
> client in a way that the client would be able to fetch it piecewise.
> Then, the client application could build the display incrementally
> while the rest of the result set travels over the (slow) link. Does
> that make sense?

No.  How would you handle the 6-million row result set?  You want the
server to cache that?  Remember, the server authors have no way to
predict client code efficiency.  What if a poorly written client
retrieves just 10 of those rows and decides it doesn't want any more,
but doesn't free up the server connection?  The server will be stuck
holding those 6 million rows in memory for a long time.  And readily
available techniques exist for the client to handle this.  Have one
thread reading rows from the DB, and a second thread drawing the
display.

--
Guy Rouillier