Hi Marc,
M. Bastin wrote:
> Yes and no. I'm looking at the subject from the frontend-backend
> protocol 3.0 point of view which is separated in the Extended Query
> language and the Simple Query language.
>
> With the PREPARE and EXECUTE statements you're accessing the Extended
> Query language through the Simple Query language, which requires more
> CPU time since your EXECUTE query itself is going to be parsed as a
> Simple Query first before PostgreSQL realizes it must execute a
> prepared statement, while when you send the commands directly through
> the Extended Query language you skip that parsing step.
Thanks for the explanation. I've only been using Postgres
via the psql monitor and client applications (most of them
written in Python, some in Perl), so I'm not familiar with
the underlying client-server protocol.
You are right that the EXECUTE statement still has to be
parsed. However, I think the pasrsing overhead is small,
because the EXECUTE command has a very simple structure
("EXECUTE <plan> <arguments>"), as opposed to, say, the
very complicated synopsis of a SELECT command. Apart
from that, the overhead of the query planner is probably
much bigger, so using PREPARE + EXECUTE is probably still
a great win, I think.
I just wonder ... I'm currently writing a client app (in
Python) which has to insert quite a lot of things. This
is for a network traffic accounting system. In particular,
the program reads accumulated accounting data from a file,
pre-processes it and creates appropriate INSERT statements
(up to several hundreds or even thousands per session).
I wonder if it will be worth to PREPARE those inserts and
the EXECUTE them. But I guess it won't make much of a
difference, because the INSERT statements are very simple
anyway.
Best regards
Oliver
--
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
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