Great! I'm not surprised it's been around a long time -- I didn't think I could be the only one to think of it.
Thanks for the heads-up on Postgres-XL -- I'd missed that one somehow.
I'm going to include the words "architecture" and "replication" so that people searching the archives in the future have more chance of finding this conversation.
I'm expecting that people will pick the idea apart, and wanted to know what people think of it.
Thanks for the proposal. This is actually a model that's been around for a very long time. And, in fact, variations of it (e.g. parsing done in one place and generated plan fragments shipped to remote execution nodes where the data resides) are already used by things like Postgres-XL. There have also been a number of academic implementations where parsing is done locally and raw parse trees are sent to the server as well. While these things do reduce CPU, there are a number of negative aspects to deal with that make such an architecture more difficult to manage.