Re: [HACKERS] More CORBA and PostgreSQL

Marc G. Fournier <scrappy@hub.org>

From: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org>
To: Michael Robinson <robinson@public.bta.net.cn>
Cc: pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org
Date: 1998-11-13T13:00:14Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Michael Robinson wrote:

> - The ORBit sources appear to be LGPL'ed, which means they can be linked to
> PostgreSQL without poisoning the BSD license.

	Mico is also LGPL'd for the libraries...

> I also have bad news to report.
> 
> - Most of the CORBA functionality that PostgreSQL would rely on is currently
> unimplemented in ORBit.

	I don't know what is implemented, but check out:

	http://www.vsb.cs.uni-frankfurt.de/~mico

	They "claim" a completely 2.2 Corba implementation...

> - While CORBA provides a very disciplined interface for allowing different
> object implementations (e.g. Python and PostgreSQL) to share the same address
> space and execution context safely and efficiently, the PostgreSQL backend
> doesn't seem ready for it.  In particular, it doesn't appear to be thread
> safe.  It may not even be reentrant, from what I can tell.  And, if a backend
> process is not punctual about reading cache synchronization messages out of
> the IPC queue, it appears that excessive cache invalidation would hurt
> performance.

	Hrmmm...does this mean that we are going to have to move towards a
threaded model vs forked?  Or is it just going to require some major code
cleanups for the 'thread safe/reentrant' as aspect?

Marc G. Fournier                                
Systems Administrator @ hub.org 
primary: scrappy@hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org