On 25 April 2016 at 03:44, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 2:23 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> FWIW, I agree with Bruce that using "degree" here is a poor choice.
>> It's an unnecessary dependence on technical terminology that many people
>> will not be familiar with.
>
> And many others will. Some made-up term that is entirely
> PostgreSQL-specific is not going to be better.
Just to add my 2c, "degree" implies some sort of graded scale. So
setting it to (say) 10 would be "maximum", setting to 0 would be
"none" and setting it to anything in between would be relative to the
maximum.
eg in Vol26 "Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology" (the
first compsci reference that appeared for a google search) there are
three levels of granularity of degrees of parallelism.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z4KECsT59NwC&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41&dq=degree+of+parallelism
Frankly it seems that the SQL crowd stole the computer science term
and applied it incorrectly.
Having a configuration option "_workers" makes much more sense to me.
It absolutely describes what it does without needing to refer to a
manual, and it removes ambiguity.
Geoff