Re: Performance of count(*)

On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 02:24:39PM -0400, Merlin Moncure wrote:
>Tino was saying that rather that build a complete indexing storage
>management solution that lives outside the database, it is better to
>do intelligent session management so that you get the simplicity if a
>two tier client server system but the scalability of a web app.

No, what he was saying was "there's this thing called a cursor". I 
thought there was enough information in the original message to indicate 
that the author knew about cursors. There are certainly pros and cons 
and nuances to different approaches, but Tino's message didn't touch on 
anything that specific. 

And even if you do use some kind of "intelligent session management", 
how many simultaneous cursors can postgres sanely keep track of? 
Thousands? Millions? Tens of Millions? I suspect there's a scalability 
limit in there somewhere. Luckily I don't spend much time in the web 
application space, so I don't need to know.  :)

Mike Stone