The Long Tail - vertical table partitioning II

Having all parts from the previous post in place, some mechanism to do the routine maintenance by calling the transfer function automagically, is needed.

Of course this could be done with pgAgent or it could be done with cron, but since it should be elegant, this calls for a background worker process.

For illustration purposes, I wrote a sample implementation called  worker_ltt based on the worker_spi sample code. Sloppy - even the orginal comments are still in there.

Adding worker_ltt to shared_preload_libraries and

worker_ltt.naptime = 60

worker_ltt.database = 'yourdb'

worker_ltt.user = 'youruser'

worker_ltt.function = 'move_longtail'

to postgresql.conf starts executing move_longtail() every 60 seconds in yourdb as youruser. If the user is omitted, it runs with superuser rights!

Since move_longtail() basically can do anything, restricting the user is a good idea.

For more security, the SQL statements could be moved entirely into the background worker, but then the approach loses much of its flexibility... But this is a concept anyway, there is always room for improvement.

But it really works.

In part III I'll try to give a raw estimate how big the performance penalty is when the partitioned table switches from fast to slow storage during a query. And there is another important problem to be solved...