As you may or may not be aware, I've been sort of ranting about high speed
frequently updated tables the last few days. Sorry if I've annoyed anyone.

It occured to me last night that PostgreSQL's recent capability of
returning sets of rows from functions was a feature that a long abandoned
project needed to really work.

Msession is a high speed session manager designed for PHP. It is not MVCC,
is is strictly RAM based. It allows for plugins and other sort of cool
features. Last time I tested it, it easily handled 4000 full
read/process/update sessions a second across hundreds of connections. I
haven't done any real development on it in well over a year, but it still
has a number of users.

Conceptially, it is kind of similar to LDAP, but designed to provide some
database-esque features. To emulate its functionality, you would do
something like this in PostgreSQL:

create table sessions(
    session_name    varchar,
    session_data    varchar,
    last_access     timestamp,
    created         timestamp
);

create table session_variables
(
    session_name    varchar,
    variable_name   varchar,
    variable_value  varchar
);

Basically, sessions are "world-unique." The variable "session_data" is
used by PHP for storing PHP's internal session information. The table
session_variables is typically used by non-PHP applications. Anyway, if
you are curious, about it, checkout the docs on the PHP website, or
checkout http://www.mohawksoft.com/devel/msession.html

The server is still around, and aside from some cleanup and bug fixes, it
could operate with a set of user loadable functions to provide some neat
features:

Looking at the above table declarations, one can do this:

SELECT * FROM session_variables WHERE session_name = 'foobar' ;
Would looks something like this:
SELECT msession_get_array('session');


SELECT session_name FROM sessions;
Looks like:
SELECT msession_list();

UPDATE session_variables SET session_variable='foo' where
session_name='bar' and variable_name='name';
Looks like:
msession_set('bar', 'name', 'foo');


The best part of it could be that it could replace the whole msession C
API with PostgreSQL. You can join against the various data, and it should
be very fast with no MVCC overhead for those aspects of your project that
don't need it while still allowing them to be incorporated with the data
that does.

Would anyone find this useful?






Fri, 11 Jun 2004 11:51:04 -0400 (EDT)
pgsql@mohawksoft.com
msession for PostgreSQL?
On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 11:51:04AM -0400, pgsql@mohawksoft.com wrote:

> The best part of it could be that it could replace the whole msession C
> API with PostgreSQL. You can join against the various data, and it should
> be very fast with no MVCC overhead for those aspects of your project that
> don't need it while still allowing them to be incorporated with the data
> that does.

I don't get it.  If msession is already successful as it is, why do you
want to change it?

It seems to me you are looking for problems to solve.  If you want to
code, there are lots of ideas in PostgreSQL's TODO.

-- 
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)


Fri, 11 Jun 2004 13:58:15 -0400
Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@dcc.uchile.cl>
Re: msession for PostgreSQL?
> On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 11:51:04AM -0400, pgsql@mohawksoft.com wrote:
>
>> The best part of it could be that it could replace the whole msession C
>> API with PostgreSQL. You can join against the various data, and it
>> should
>> be very fast with no MVCC overhead for those aspects of your project
>> that
>> don't need it while still allowing them to be incorporated with the data
>> that does.
>
> I don't get it.  If msession is already successful as it is, why do you
> want to change it?
>
> It seems to me you are looking for problems to solve.  If you want to
> code, there are lots of ideas in PostgreSQL's TODO.

Actually, *all* problems have been more or less solved given enough tools
time to piece together the solution. SQL itself didn't really *solve* a
problem, it only made an easier solution.

In a highly interactive web site or other complex DB project, there are
different classes of data storage and services. High volatility, low
volatility, temporary, more long lasting. PostgreSQL falls apart on the
high volatility temporary data class of problem.

In 1999-2002, I was working for a Web company that needed to spread
session information across a lot of boxes. The target was thousands of
hits per second, tens or hundreds of thousands of active users. Think
about the scalability of that problem. Most of the transactions would be
wasted. It was a huge waste to try to make sure all these actions were
saved. We could lose the temporary information once in a while with no
problems, but we had to keep the perminent information.

So, one class of data, the instantaneous "what they did last" and maybe
shopping cart information was important, but could be lost once in a very
great while without any loss of company revenue or reputation.

The next class of problem was the transaction class of problem, credid
card numbers, billing, and accounting, you can't screw around with that
stuff.

The next class of problem were the fixed inventory tables, product IDs,
links to jpegs, etc.

The next service was replication of persistent data (user info, inventory,
etc.) to the slaves.

The next service was full text search of the product inventory.

The last service was a recommendations system.

As Tom and Bruce will probably remember, I've been a real PITA. I was
pushing for sets of rows being able to be returned from functions since
7.0.

Anyway, what we finally made was a real kludge. I eventually used my
msession server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, PHP, my own full text search engine
(FTSS), and my own recommendations system (CGR).

The hard part of this system was that I was the only one who understood it
all. Having written most of it, I was always the one to fix it or debug
it. It worked, it didn't cost near a million dollars, but it was way too
complicated. Where was the data? In Oracle? in PostgreSQL? In Msession? In
FTSS? In CGR? How did you join information in msession to rows in Oracle?
How did you join rows in Oracle to rows in PostgreSQL? And so on.

The purpose of these various diatribes and rants is to address some issues
with PostgreSQL that limited its application and thus forced us to use
other technologies for different classes of problem. Currently being a
consultant, and advising on these classes of problem, I am still
continuing to create what I consider to be overly complicated systems.

Ideally, I would like to have a single interface to the required data and
functionality. It would be fantastic if users didn't all each have to
solve these problems. It would be a huge plus for PostgreSQL as it would
become *the* web DB of choice over *any* competitor.



Fri, 11 Jun 2004 16:19:09 -0400 (EDT)
pgsql@mohawksoft.com
Re: msession for PostgreSQL?