Hi. I'm requesting advice on something I'm about to start on.
In a normally 2-tier system, where "desktop" native apps connect directly to PostgreSQL to access data, some things must be mediated via a middle-tier service (i.e. 3-tier architecture). That service is HTTP based thus clients (the "desktop" native apps) must know the URL (host+port+path) of a server providing the requested service.
Since clients must already have access to PostgreSQL to operate, I wanted to add a table in PostgreSQL for services, and server(s) on startup (probably using a random port) would register in that table, and deregister on shutdown. Also, since crashes are a fact of life, the server would regularly update the DB with a "heartbeat" on some frequency (e.g. 1s?), so clients would select (or see) only registered services with a "fresh enough" heartbeat timestamp.
That's basically my plan. Now come the questions:
1) will updating a row every second (for example) create issues?
2) if yes to #1 above, what would be good mitigation tactics? Use different table for service vs heartbeat? Special kind of table? or configured in a particular way?
3) if a service crashes, it won't remove its row(s), obviously. What kind of mechanism exists to "reap" "zombie" services?
4) Related to #3 above, I think built-in "cron"-like services are only available via extensions, not in PostgreSQL proper. Why? Seems like such an essential service.
5) Which cron-like extension to use? Especially since we run both on-prem but also in managed-PostgreSQL on the cloud?
I'd appreciate community input. Thanks, --DD
PS: Note that there could be more than 1 server registered, for the same service, possibly on the same machine, for redundancy. But I think that's mostly orthogonal to my questions above.
