Re: pg_stat_*_columns?

I think the idea sounds promising. If near real-time data is required, we could just update once every second, which should be often enough for everybody.

Each backend process could then simply INSERT the stats for each txn that committed/rollbacked into an UNLOGGED table, and then the collector would do one single UPDATE of the collector stats based on the aggregate of the rows inserted since the previous update a second ago and then delete the processed rows (naturally in one operation, using DELETE FROM .. RETURNING *).

That way we could get rid of the legacy communication protocol between the backends and the collector and instead rely on unlogged tables for the submission of data from the backends to the collector.

INSERTing 100 000 rows to an unlogged table takes 70 ms on my laptop, so should be fast enough to handle the 10s of thousands of updates per second we need to handle.