On 21/01/2008, Alex Turner <armtuk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I love Postgresql to death, it's one of the shining stars of the Open Source > movement IMHO. It's rock solid, crashes less frequently than Oracle in my > experience, and does almost everything I could ask of it (granted - I don't > ask much often, just simple things like consistent behaviour, which seems to > elude many other products). My one biggest bone to pick with Postgresql is > that stored procedures are not compiled. It makes writing anything but the > most trivial things in plpgsql stupid because it will slow the crap out of > your queries. For example: I wrote a simple function to return the distance > between two lat longs in plpgsql. Not only did it choke on values that were > part of a valid domain when calling acos() (I have a list of them someplace > that I keep meaning to post as it seems like a really bad bug), it was slow. > I re-implemented in C and it was 8-12 times faster, and didn't error out on > acos for the same values. Expecting DBAs to be able to write functions in C > IMHO is a bit unrealistic. I am far from a typical DBA, I've met precious > few Oracle DBAs who could write functions in C. Trying to implement good > database code that is atomic and makes good use of functions in Postgresql > is an uphill battle because they slow the database down so much. Usability of plpgsql depend on case. There are some case where plpgsql is useless: http://www.pgsql.cz/index.php/PL/pgSQL_%28en%29#When_is_PL.2FpgSQL_not_applicable when you use plpgsql as glue of SQL statements, then speed of plpgsql >> speed of SQL statements and there isn't problem. Your example is real and I understand well, but bottleneck isn't in interpretation, is it in evaluation of basic types, where C do this work simply and fast and plpgsql call SQL expression evaluator. I am not sure if its possible to write compiler for all supported platforms. I thinking about plpgsql->c translator with some intelligence for detecting some simply operations. Any sponsors? Regards Pavel Stehule ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org/
