unorthodox use of PG for a customer

Hi Everyone:

I'm going to throw this internal customer request out for ideas, even though I think it's a bit crazy.  I'm on the brink of telling him it's impractical and/or inadvisable.  But maybe someone has a solution.

He's writing a script/program that runs on a workstation and needs to write data to a DB.  This process also sends work to a batch system on a server farm external to the workstation that will create multiple, parallel jobs/processes that also have to write to the DB as well. The workstation may have many of these jobs running at the same time.  And there are 58 workstation which all have/use locally mounted disks for this work. 

At first blush, this is easy.  Just create a DB on a server and have all those clients work with it.  But he's also adamant about having the DB on the same server(s) that ran the script AND on the locally mounted disk.  He said he doesn't want the overhead, dependencies and worries of anything like an external DB with a DBA, etc... . He also wants this to be fast.

 

My first thought was SQLite.  Apparently, they now have some sort of multiple, concurrent write ability.  But there's no way those batch jobs on remote machines are going to be able to get at the locally mounted disk on the workstation. So I dismissed that idea.  Then I thought about having 58 PG installs, one per workstation, each serving all the jobs pertaining to that workstation.  That could work.  But 58 DB instances ?  If he didn't like the ideal of one DBA, 58 can't be good.  Still, the DB would be on the workstation which seems to be what he wants.

 

I can't think of anything better.  Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in Advance !