Chapter 13. Pooling and Caching

One of the unfortunate limitations of any database software, one that's particularly apparent in PostgreSQL, is that there is a lot of overhead you're paying for, even when executing really simple queries. If you have a complicated join happening, you should be happy to pay the expense of query optimization. But if you're just reading a simple table, the overhead of opening a database connection and waiting for that query to execute can be higher than you'd like.

There are two common approaches for reducing that overhead, pooling and caching, and both are introduced in this chapter. This sort of software is external to the database, it is relatively complicated to set up, and its use is very application dependent. Accordingly, the focus here is on general theory rather than trying to show a working example. It's unlikely any one example would translate into your environment very well anyway.