As discussed in the previous post, it would be nice to be able to automatically start background workers instead of having to do that manually each time you start the server, so it will be covered in this post. As always, the code is available in the timescale/pg_influx repository on GitHub. To automatically start background …
Continue reading Server Startup and Configuration Options
Tag:Systems Programming
Processing packets in parallel through port reuse
The implementation of the Influx reader this far as been pretty straightforward: a single process that reads data from a single port and insert it into the database. Databases are, however, designed to be able to handle multiple inserts at the same time, so what is preventing us from using multiple processes to ingest data? …
Continue reading Processing packets in parallel through port reuse
Using prepared statements through the SPI
In the previous post, you could see how to use the server programming interface to execute statements that modified the database. This was done by creating a statement containing the all the data that needed to be inserted, but that also meant generating a string from already parsed data, which seems like a waste of …
Continue reading Using prepared statements through the SPI
It’s all in the Background
In contrast to MySQL—which is a multi-thread database system—PostgreSQL is a multi-process database system. In multi-process systems you have a process tree with several processes that interact to share the work, but only a single thread for each process. Multi-process and multi-thread systems both have advantages and disadvantages, some of which are discussed in this post. Since PostgreSQL is a multi-process system, the focus will be on PostgreSQL and multi-process systems.
In this post you will see how to add a background worker to the extension and how to spawn new background workers.
This post assume that you’re familiar with C programming and also familiar with programming for Linux. In particular, you need to know about processes, signals, and sockets in Linux: what they are, how they work, and what they are used for.
