Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 2:27 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> I don't think that bgworkers as currently implemented make this any more
>> practical than it was before. The communication overhead with a
>> separate process would swamp any benefit in most cases.
> I'm baffled by your statement that the communication overhead would be
> too high. What IPC mechanism are you presuming, and why would it be
> any more expensive in PostgreSQL than in any other database (a number
> of which do have parallel query execution)?
Well, right at the moment we don't have *any* IPC mechanism that would
work, so the cost is infinity. But the real issues here are the same
as we touched on in the recent round of discussions about parallelism:
you'd have to export snapshots, locks, etc to another process before it
could start taking over any planning work for you, and once you did have
all the context shared, there would still be a tremendous amount of
two-way communication needed, because the parallelizable units of work
are not very large. There's too much work yet to be done before this is
remotely practical.
As for other databases, I suspect that ones that have parallel execution
are probably doing it with a thread model not a process model.
regards, tom lane