Re: WIP patch for parallel pg_dump

Tatsuo Ishii <ishii@postgresql.org>

From: Tatsuo Ishii <ishii@postgresql.org>
To: stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc
Cc: tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us, josh@agliodbs.com, marcin.mank@gmail.com, greg@2ndquadrant.com, joe@mcknight.de, andrew@dunslane.net, robertmhaas@gmail.com, heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2010-12-07T07:27:54Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
> On 12/07/2010 01:22 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:
>>>> However, if you were doing something like parallel pg_dump you could
>>>> just run the parent and child instances all against the slave, so the
>>>> pg_dump scenario doesn't seem to offer much of a supporting use-case for
>>>> worrying about this.  When would you really need to be able to do it?
>> 
>>> If you had several standbys, you could distribute the work of the
>>> pg_dump among them.  This would be a huge speedup for a large database,
>>> potentially, thanks to parallelization of I/O and network.  Imagine
>>> doing a pg_dump of a 300GB database in 10min.
>> 
>> That does sound kind of attractive.  But to do that I think we'd have to
>> go with the pass-the-snapshot-through-the-client approach.  Shipping
>> internal snapshot files through the WAL stream doesn't seem attractive
>> to me.
> 
> this kind of functionality would also be very useful/interesting for
> connection poolers/loadbalancers that are trying to distribute load
> across multiple hosts and could use that to at least give some sort of
> consistency guarantee.

In addition to this, that will greatly help query based replication
tools such as pgpool-II. Sounds great.
--
Tatsuo Ishii
SRA OSS, Inc. Japan
English: http://www.sraoss.co.jp/index_en.php
Japanese: http://www.sraoss.co.jp