On 4/8/06, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> ... but I'm failing to follow where it says that parallel processing
> will fix that. All I can foresee in that direction is extra data
> transfer costs, bought at the price of portability and locking headaches.
I don't think it's any less portable than the system is now; It's just
enabling multiple slave processes to participate in scans and
processing (parallel query, parallel index builds, parallel sorts,
...) Likewise, the additional I/O cost isn't that much of an issue
because systems which really take advantage of this type of parallel
processing have large bandwidth I/O arrays anyway.
I didn't even want to mention that EVERY other database I know of
(Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SQL Server, Ingres, Bizgres MPP, MaxDB) supports
this, but it's a pretty obvious win for many environments.
--
Jonah H. Harris, Database Internals Architect
EnterpriseDB Corporation
732.331.1324