Postgresql Application Insertion and Trigger Performance

Question

I'm working on designing an application with a SQL backend (Postgresql) and I've got a some design questions. In short, the DB will serve to store network events as they occur on the fly, so insertion speed and performance is critical due 'real-time' actions depending on these events. The data is dumped into a speedy default format across a few tables, and I am currently using postgresql triggers to put this data into some other tables used for reporting.

On a typical event, data is inserted into two different tables each share the same primary key (an event ID). I then need to move and rearrange the data into some different tables that are used by a web-based reporting interface. My primary goal/concern is to keep the load off the initial insertion tables, so they can do their thing. Reporting is secondary, but it would still be nice for this to occur on the fly via triggers as opposed to a cron job where I have to query and manage events that have already been processed. Reporting should/will never touch the initial insertion tables. Performance wise..does this make sense or am I totally off?

Once the data is in the appropriate reporting tables, I won't need to hang on to the data in the insertion tables too long, so I'll keep those regularly pruned for insertion performance. In thinking about this scenario, which I'm sure is semi-common, I've come up with three options:

1. Use triggers to trigger on the initial row insert and populate the reporting tables. This was my original plan.

2. Use triggers to copy the insertion data to a temporary table (same format), and then trigger or cron to populate the reporting tables. This was just a thought, but I figure that a simple copy operation to a temp table will offload any of the query-ing of the triggers in the solution above.

3. Modify my initial output program to dump all the data to a single table (vs across two) and then trigger on that insert to populate the reporting tables. So where solution 1 is a multi-table to multi-table trigger situation, this would be a single-table source to multi-table trigger.

Am I over thinking this? I want to get this right. Any input is much appreciated!

Answer 1

You may experience have a slight increase in performance since there are more "things" to do (although they should not affect operations in any way). But using Triggers/other PL is a good way to reduce it to minimum subce they are executed faster than code that gets sent from your application to the DB-Server.

I would go with your first idea 1) since it seems to me the cleanest and most efficient way. 2) is the most performance hungry solution since cron will do more queries than the other solutions that use server-side functions. 3) would be possible but will resulst in an "uglier" database layout.