After a long battle with technology, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Greg Stark), an earthling, wrote: > This wouldn't really be a part of Postgres though, just another > application using Postgres. It could be something Postgres could > recommend for people who find cron too awkward for their > application.
This has considerable merit. One thing that is unfortunate about cron is that it provides little verifyable feedback. It logs some things, sort of... A "cron implementation using PostgreSQL as data store" would have a wonderfully natural place to record log information in a usefully structured fashion. When a job runs, it would be a splendid idea to record such things as: - Job ID (perhaps an OID, or some other candidate primary key) - PID - Start time - End time - Exit code Given all of the above, a job might look at the logs and self-terminate if there's another instance still running from last hour. Jobs that are supposed to be mutually exclusive could detect as much. You could _attempt_ to run a job every hour, and have it decide "Oh, I've already run successfully in the last [interval], so I'll not bother." None of this means forcing it into the database implementation; it just means that it would be useful. "pgcron" sounds like an utterly splendid idea. -- output = ("cbbrowne" "@" "gmail.com") http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/x.html "Applicants must have *at least* five years experience with Windows XCVIII..." ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings