Temporary Tables and Web Application

[Tim Tassonis <timtas@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi all

I assume this is not an uncommon problem, but so far, I haven't been 
able to find a good answer to it.

I've got a table that holds log entries and fills up very fast during 
the day, it gets approx. 25 million rows per day. I'm now building a web 
application using apache/mod_php where you can query the database and 
then should be able to page through the results.

My idea was that whenever a user constructs a query, I create a 
temporary table holding the results and then page through this table, 
which should work very well in principle.

But from what I've been able to find out, temporary tables live only in 
the Postgres Session they have been created in and are destroyed upon 
session descructuion.

Now, with apache/php in a mpm environment, I have no guarantee that a 
user will get the same postgresql session for a subsequent request, thus 
he will not see the temporary table.

Is there a way to create temporary tables in another way, so they are 
visible between sessions, or do I need to create real tables for my 
purpose? And is the perfomance penalty big for real tables, as they have 
been written to disk/read from disk?


Tim